People often ask me when I go on jobs: What is the most exciting thing you have done recently? They expect tales of danger, travel and glamorous celebrities - mostly they go away disappointed. Don’t get me wrong; my job s exciting but sometimes it only excites me. Stories such as the time I got a lovely bit of light on a portrait or how I got a great shot of a total unknown tend to go down like a lead balloon. So, while half of the point of this blogis to share the joy I feel in the simple act of doing my job, the other half is to tell people when I do things they would genuinely find exciting.

In that vein I will tell you about a recent trip I made to Tanzania for TNR Communications, covering a project for P&G and Asda.

I have been to Africa a few times doing everything from photographing people enjoying beer (I know, tough gig right?) to medical photography. It is a place as varied as it is big and all I ever see are moments in time. I was in Cape Town just before the World Cup witnessing life in the posh bars on the coast to the townships and all I saw was happy people. In Sudan, there was the very unique unease of being treated very well by a government who were at that very moment committing genocide. Khartoum was a bubble of calm with every pick-up mounted machine gun reminding you that stepping out of ine here was a very dangerous thing to do.

The trip to Tanzania was to cover clean drinking water projects near Arusha and it was going to be a very different to any of my other trips to this continent. Like the good English person I am, let me start with the weather. There was none of that dry, African heat. When we arrived at Kilimanjaro airport, lightening was dramatically silhouetting the mountain and that night the heavens opened. We were working in rural communities a couple ofhours outside Arusha. This was the first time I had seen rural Africa and to see it in a flood was quite a shock. Water covered most of the fields and any large dips in the road became treacherous river crossings where many people were getting stuck. Since the reason for our trip was water, the rainset the tone for our whole trip.

The first place we visited was an Aids project, which looked after people who had contracted the HIV virus. It turned out that diarrhoea caused by dirty drinking water was a huge killer among this group. They had a well and the water being pulled from it looked clear because of the rain, but was far from clean.

P&G has created a water purification powder that when stirred in to 10 litres of water, kills all bacteria, parasites and clears the water of any debris. So as the temperature outside had risen by this point, we were all drinking water pulled from a well only 20 minutes earlier. Considering that as a foreigner the advice is not to even brush your teeth with water from the tap, here I was drinking water from a source that had been killing people here before the packets arrived. That is pretty amazing!

On the next day we visited a Maasai community, this was a different world even to the one we had seen the day before. Save for the mobile phones (charged using a solar panel and a car battery) this little group of huts may as well have been medieval. Here one of the women was simply collecting water from a whole in the ground dug to collect rain water and to our eyes was a glorified puddle. Bearing in mind that this was the best of times and that in dry season finding any water was a struggle it was no surprise they were getting sick.

Working in Africa is never easy: I can’t speak Swahili; my skin is as white as the driven snow - all I have to do is think of the sun and I get sunburn, and things often work to a different time scale than our media-driven schedule. But if any of these were problems, they were very small. I found that learning the words for Hello, Smile and Thank You meant that I gained an unofficial ‘certificate in photographer’s Swahili’ – all you need to know to make things run smoothly.

Now, I have already mentioned I take joy from simply doing my job, but working in Tanzania was more than that. In London you get very used to your subjects ambivalence (at best) and open hostility (at worst) to having their picture taken. Not so here. Everyone was kind, helpful and excited by the prospect of being photographed. There was a natural openness to the way people behaved in front of the camera. No one changed when you lifted to the camera to your eye. When you don’t have to fight against that, it changes everything about the way you work and the photographs you get as a result.