An interview with Nikon Gold Prize winner Jason Parnell-Brookes

Photography Jason Parnell-Brookes

We talk to the internationally award-winning photographer, educator and writer based in Frome. We discuss favourite equipment, keeping inspired & creating new content when working for multiple magazines, an adventure in Iceland and more.

I suppose an obvious place to start is could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into photography? 

I’m Jason Parnell-Brookes and I’ve been a photographer for the past ten years. My career has taken me across continents and through a wide range of photographic disciplines. After experimenting with my first point-and-shoot and then upgrading to my first DSLR (a Nikon D90) I was transfixed on the world of macro.

By reversing lenses, stacking them, using filters and extension tubes I studied macro without having much of a budget for expensive lenses or lighting.  It was a few years later that I entered my first competitions, with macrophotography, and had a good degree of success. I won an award for my macro work shooting jumping spiders, but soon after with landscapes, too. I started working as an image retoucher on big fashion brands and before long became a photographer for Superdry.

Fashion was great, but it lacked the diversity that I love in photography, so sought out editorial work. My initial assignments were as a photographer for music magazine like Prog Rock, and I worked with a number of music bands before landing a staff writer position at N-Photo magazine. 

I’ve not just worked in a lot of disciplines, but lucky enough to have been awarded, too. I was highly commended in the Mammal Society Photographer of the Year in 2013, named Digital Photographer of the Year for my macro work in 2014, and won Gold Prize for my portraiture in the Nikon Photo Contest International 2018/19 for which I was flown to Tokyo to pick up my award.  

A huge congratulations on your Gold Prize at the Nikon Photo Contest award, thoroughly deserved.

You have such a wealth of knowledge when it comes to the subject, how did you come up withnwith and different ideas when working for N-Photo Magazine?

I’ve been fortunate enough to work professionally in a number of disciplines, from portrait to landscape, macro to fashion and other commercial jobs. So my knowledge comes from the experience and practise of places I’ve worked with other talented photographers and retouchers.  

Coming up with new and different ideas for tutorials in N-Photo magazine was tough, as it still is writing for my other clients such as CreativeBloq, Movavi and FStoppers to name a few. It’s important to come up with new ideas, because the first thing subscribers complain about is the year-long repetition that comes with tutorials.  

On N-Photo I was the first writer since the magazine started to introduce a new tutorial section on lighting techniques, something that beginners sorely lack. I wanted to keep things fresh so I always experimented with new techniques, and fortunately, because I’ve worked professionally in so many disciplines, I was relatively successful. The best way of forming something new is to take two interesting ideas/styles and smash them together.

For example, a long exposure action portrait that introduced off-camera lighting as you can see in my fire poi photograph. There are so many variables, for example: you want a long shutter speed to capture movement in the fire poi, but not so long that it overexposes and loses detail in the flame.

You also need to balance the fire light with the ambient light in the sky. Then there’s the introduction of off-camera flash, which needs to blend seamlessly with the other two sources of light, and that’s before you even concentrate on composition, form, colour and everything else.     

You have such a creative flare for many types of the genre, but do you have a favourite?  

Macrophotography was my first love and is still my favourite. Over the years I’ve enjoyed landscapes, astrophotography and other genres, but macro is still where I feel most at home. Nature photography in general is actually where my heart is, I adore the natural world, wildlife and atmospheric phenomena (don’t get me started on clouds because I’ll be talking all day long).     

You spend a lot of time with a range of equipment from different manufacturers, what are the features you look for when reviewing them and do you have a go to camera?  

For my personal use I don’t care whether a piece of kit was made by one manufacturer over another, but I am drawn to Nikon and always have been. Time and time again photographers talk about using a certain system because it ‘just feels right’ and ergonomics are a big part of why I like Nikon - they just seem to have everything in the right place and it makes it easy to shoot. Camera kit has to do a few things for me to like it.

It’s got to be lightweight, work fast, operate consistently, and have a small form factor. I’ve spent years lugging heavy camera bodies and great big lenses across mountains and through snow blizzards, so if there’s something out there that can do everything I need in a smaller form factor, I’m in. That’s why mirrorless seems so exciting to me - because that’s what it seems to be offering. I generally upgrade my kit every five years or so.

Right now I’m shooting on a Nikon D750 - it’s great for high ISO work, which makes it ideal for astrophotography, but also small and quiet enough for wildlife and has a good dynamic range for landscapes. I have three lenses, the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8D, Nikkor 50mmm f/1.4G, and the Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VRII. All these lenses are super sharp, as light as they can be, and built to last.  

I agree, lightweight gear is the way forward for me, spent too many a time over the years lugging all the gear around and putting my back out.

Your job requires quite a bit of travelling and you've been on many adventures, could you share with us any tales from your favorite shoots?  

Back a few years ago when I took my first trip to Iceland I was waiting for a photographer to arrive in Keflavik airport before heading up to our accommodation in Grundarfjörður.

The plane was getting in at midnight but arrived late. It was about 12:30am when I checked my emails and saw that the local photographer I was meeting up with had informed me that a snow blizzard was coming in and that it’s being advised not to travel after 12:00am.

The plane eventually landed but I had to wait another 30mins while they de-iced the plane doors because they were frozen shut. An hour later, sleep deprived and hungry, we set off in pitch black through the blizzard. It was my first time driving abroad, on the other side of the car, on the other side of the road, at night, during a blizzard. As I passed Reykjavík, I could see cars spun out on the side of the road. Little did I know that after driving up into the mountains, with visibility reduced to one metre and getting stuck twice in the two-wheel drive Kia, it had taken me around 6 hours to cover what would normally take 2hrs45mins.

I had about two hours for sleep (I didn’t sleep) before we were up ahead of sunrise to go and do a day’s shooting around the Snæfellsnes peninsula. We got some amazing shots, but that drive was crazily dangerous.  

Blimey, that is quite the story! Reminds me of a time in Sri Lanka…but we’ll save that for another time.

Lastly, are you working on anything exciting and what does the future hold for JPB?

I’m currently shooting and writing for a number of places, and holding photography workshops here in the UK and abroad. As a qualified teacher I love to show others how to get into photography and it brings me a lot of joy to see people enjoying themselves the way I do.

I’m also working a little more on my personal work lately and having fun experimenting with different techniques that I’ll be introducing to my published work and in my workshops and tours. If you want to stay up to date with what I’m doing, head to www.jasonpb.com for details.