Alex Stead

If a professional photographer’s success is to be measured by the number of flights they take in a year on assignment, then Alex Stead must be well on his way to the top. Hardly a week goes by when he’s not jetting to another continent working for blue chip clients in locations many of us can only dream about. There can’t be many other photographers of the millennial generation who can claim to have worked for Mercedes, Porsche, Lufthansa and the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain, but Alex’s story is a measure of how the new wave of commercial photographers have broken through by raising their profile and influence through the reach of social media…

Where have you just flown in from and what were you doing?

I was in Tanzania and I was photographing hotels out in the Serengeti. I spent three nights at a hotel safari camp called One Nature Nyaruswiga, which only has 13 rooms and 45 staff. The other hotel was much larger, that was the Four Seasons in the central Serengeti.

Were you taking publicity shots?

Yeah, it’s one part of my work, helping hotels with content because when they initially shoot, they get architectural photographers and they shoot very traditionally, a lot of rooms and a lot of furniture. The shots are beautiful but they’re very static. So I come in and I’ll shoot from smaller hotels all the