When I was asked to photograph people at such an iconic building as the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, my first thought was, how can I incorporate the architecture and environment into the pictures?

The brief was to photograph the Dean of the school, Prof Ngaire Woods, being interviewed by Prof Denis Noble and Prof William James (seen above), which was fine, but those photos could in fact have been taken anywhere and I'm not even including them in this blog post, because you can see the full interviews on the Voices from Oxford web site. So before and after the interviews, I was on the lookout for interesting informal shots that show something about the place. In the image above, we are on the top floor of the Blavatnik and can see the beautiful old Observatory through the window. This particular view may not be available for much longer, because, as you can see, more buildings are being constructed on this site.

In this second picture, I asked Prof Noble and Prof James to walk down the stairs while chatting informally, with instructions to "Ignore the photographer!". This was far preferable to a posed shot, and by using a wide angle lens I was able to incorporate something of the architecture into the composition.

All the images in today's shoot were taken using natural light. The Blavatnik is surrounded by glass (symbolising, rather optimistically in my view, the transparency of government!), which allowed plenty of daylight into the entire building.