Former regional press photographer John Angerson has travelled the world to capture pictures for a new book… about seafood.

John, who trained on the Northampton Chronicle & Echo, got a dream job when he was commissioned by Grimsby company Young’s Bluecrest to take pictures of people who help bring the fruits of the sea to the plates of the UK.

Celebrating Seafood was put together to mark the company’s 200 years of trading, and John travelled to 17 countries including the Seychelles, Iceland and Sri Lanka.

John (pictured) said: “It literally was a dream job. It was hard work, one day I was in Iceland and the next the Columbian mangroves, and it certainly wasn’t the sort of job you could go back and do again if you weren’t happy with the results!

“The worst and the best part was on the same trip to Sri Lanka, just after the tsunami, for the tuna fishing.

“We chugged out for a day, and the boat broke down. The pictures were taken while I had sea sickness. I just knew I had to get the work done, and I would venture as far as I dared from my bed to do them.

“Three days later we returned after the boat had been fixed. I was sunburnt, dehydrated and covered in mosquito bites.”

He said: “This sort of project would not have been possible without the backing of Young’s Bluecrest, and it could have gone completely wrong so it was very brave of them. It was a case of ‘here are some plane tickets and off you go’.

“A lot of businesses would have wanted complete control over it, someone would have been over my shoulder all of the time, but they just let me go off and do it.

“Having taken pictures for newspapers and magazines I knew we wanted to get the involvement of the people over, and that is what the book has done.”

The 82-page book includes celebrity recipes and fishing features as well as John’s photography, and was launched with an exhibition at the National Fishing Heritage Centre.

Young’s is donating £1 from the sale of each book to help rebuild a village in Sri Lanka badly damaged by the tsunami but whose boats supplied fish to the company.

Commercial director Jim Cane said: “We wanted John’s photography to illustrate the world’s best seafood, the efforts that our suppliers take in catching and producing it.

“His pictures are the backbone of a book in which we have tried to capture all the things that feed our passion for fish – it’s a mouth-watering anthology about one of the planet’s richest and most exciting sources of food.”