“I didn’t use Photoshop (in the way you think) for these pictures – but everyone assumes I did”

I’ve been to the distant lands of creativity in Photoshop. Every fad every other photographer has done, and more. Levitating women, winged women, a woman with many nipples - not my best moment. Dresses turning into oceans, hair turning into fire, or plonking a giraffe over the model completely (don’t laugh, that one ended up in the Saatchi Gallery…)

Think of it as ethical. I’ve laid out a sleeping lion in an English manor, turned a peacock into a woman’s hat, and even transformed Peter Paul Rubens’ 1617 severed ‘Head of Medusa’ into a rather fashionable telephone. All with lion and peacock unharmed, and headless man dead anyway…

But what might surprise people is that some of my most popular images used almost zero Photoshop, and they involved some rather hairy experiences to get them.

My piece White Witch Awakening literally just graced the cover of Artmajeur magazine – it’s our most sold fine-art print of all time. It was actually originally commissioned for a Nikon D810 ad campaign in 2014. Their remit was, no Photoshop. I baulked at first – then got excited, because everything we would normally magic in Photoshop, we had to source for real.

That included a dreamy styled model, the entire taxidermy collection of Aynhoe Park (an English stately home), a bucket of white paint to blank out the Orangery completely, and, just to make things extra difficult for ourselves – a live zebra.

We didn’t quite know how difficult it would be to get that final composition under pressure. What you don’t see is a zebra handler hiding every last pixel of themselves behind the stuffed polar bear. The zebra, bucking wildly between every shot, broke out from its fishing-wire leash. That slither of fishing wire is literally the only thing we were allowed to Photoshop out.

The pic went on to disgruntle an animal rights activist when he saw it on a Hong Kong metro billboard, and the ad was pulled. My dismay was assuaged when the director of Saatchi Art clamoured to make it available as a print, and I’ve made a healthy fine-art livelihood ever since.

The Governess was our own shoot in Belvoir Castle where we were told in no uncertain terms to be extremely careful with the 500-year-old carpet. We were resigned to having the model just stand there. The final shot, stitched from two images, wields no trickery. It didn’t need lions or tigers or bears – it already had enough. The model looked like some psychedelic vision as she was. The gold gilt ceiling, panned up by a stitch-shot, was enough for the wow. No Photoshopped elements, no CGI, and certainly no AI.

And then there was our time shooting for Guo Pei, known as the Alexander McQueen of China. She makes dresses that are more like art installations, and we went over to Beijing to shoot them on the Great Wall of China.

But then she brought out we called the Boat Dress. This dress was as terrifying as it was beautiful. The thinnest models you’d ever seen, queued at the casting being rejected till they found one tiny enough to fit into it. Even she took three hours to climb in. Being inside it I could imagine was probably like being in Trunchbull’s chokey. And I, who loves locations, was just as confined to the chokey of a studio to shoot it.

I fired away, rather like a lookbook, as hurriedly as I could so the model could hurry out of the fancy sarcophagus as soon as possible, and I onto the plane home to edit it. I tested placing it into different locations. But my attempts made the dress feel fake. The dress was so awesome, so detailed, that it was already the focus.

Yes, it’s a boat dress, but overboard is my middle name! Subtlety in editing is something I find difficult. But I tried something I very, very seldom do: I put it on a black background. I added dress detail into an oval border, so it looked like a locket. She looked like a tree. Locket Tree. It felt right…

Plot spoiler though, we paid someone to cut that entire dress out. Whatever of their eyesight remains, and if the model herself is still breathing, we hope they like the result too.

You can play a guessing game of which are Photoshopped, semi-Photoshopped and zero-Photoshopped at www.surrealfashion.co.uk. Some use old paintings, some use CGI. None to date use AI…