About

I spent eleven years photographing weddings before I started making camera accessories. That is the short version of why Akara Labs exists. The longer version is that I have never been able to leave a piece of equipment alone if I thought it could be better.

Behind the camera first

My wife and I set up limeleafmedia.com in 2007 to shoot non-traditional wedding photography, and it ran for eleven years. More than a hundred weddings across the UK and abroad, then commercial work: restaurant and food photography, location shoots, portraits.

Canon featured our work in their Professional Services brochures and put it on the walls of their UK headquarters. I was a Duchy office photographer for a period, commissioned to photograph King Charles at events in the South West. There were conversations with Canon about becoming an ambassador, teaching their system to photographers around the world, before I changed direction.

Eleven years of that teaches you things about equipment that no spec sheet does. What a camera feels like in your hand at hour nine of a wedding. Which accessories you keep on the body and which end up in the bottom of the bag by lunchtime. How much bulk you will tolerate before you take a thing off and leave it at home.

Making things, the whole time

I studied engineering and CAD at college, and the making side never really went away. In the early 2000s I was a Visualisation Design Engineer at Andromeda Telematics, designing and programming intelligent building and lighting systems. I worked on Harrods, on Citibank, and was part of the team responsible for the lighting at Canary Wharf Station. I designed the touchscreen interfaces, drew the floor plans and icons, programmed the logic and then went on site to install and commission the hardware I had specified.

After that came the games industry, first as a QA technician at Electronic Arts, then leading QA teams at SCi and Eidos on AAA titles. In this time I also built a Half-Life 2 mod called 'Rock 24' with a friend that made its way on to magazine cover disks (remember those?).

Then two decades of software: building websites for businesses across Devon in the UK, full stack work at a furniture components manufacturer, front end development at AJ Bell, and Next.js work at Findel. I still design and build games in Unreal in my own time.

Design, engineering, code, photography. It looked like a scattered career from the outside. In practice it was a creative outlet using different levers.

Why the Slim Skin exists

I do not like camera cases. Most of them undo the reason you bought the camera in the first place. You buy a compact rangefinder because it is small and discreet, then wrap it in half-case leather that adds bulk and weight. So I designed the thing I actually wanted: a skin that adds grip and protection without changing the character of the camera. Thirty grams. No bulk. Off in seconds when you need to swap the battery.

Every case goes through a lot of iterations before anything gets listed. When a case wraps a camera this closely, tenths of a millimetre are the difference between a fit that feels custom and one that feels approximate. That part is not glamorous and it is most of the work.

Why the M-Coder exists

About fifteen years ago I wanted my Summicron 50mm coded so my Leica M9 would recognise it. Leica would do it, at a price. So I did it myself with a Dremel and a steady hand, which worked but was not something I would recommend to anyone.

The M-Coder is that problem solved properly. It clips onto the lens flange and holds the pen over the right position, so coding takes about twenty seconds instead of a nervous ten minutes with a tool that could ruin a lens. It works on Leica glass and on Voigtländer, Zeiss, 7Artisans, TTArtisan, Thypoch and Light Lens Lab lenses too. If you want the detail, there is a full guide to 6-bit coding here, including the code table.

How things get made

My products are designed and manufactured here in the UK, in my workshop near Manchester. Nothing is outsourced, and nothing sits in a warehouse. Orders are made to order on my own machines, which means I can offer a case in four configurations for a camera that sold in modest numbers, and it means a design gets revised the moment I (or a customer) find something worth improving rather than when the last container clears.

It also means that when you email about an order, you are emailing the person who designed the product, made it, and packed it.

What I care about

• Minimal by default. If a feature adds bulk without earning it, it does not go on. The least product that delivers all of the function.
• Products people forget about. It should be a product that works so well it melts into everyday use and doesn't feel like something you lug around. You should only feel disappointed when you forgot to take it with you.
• Precision fit. Products that fit precisely and just feel natural in use.
• Answering my own emails. Small enough that this is still possible, and I would like to keep it that way.