My photography began with a Kodak Instamatic 126 when I was 11 years old. I took loads of photos with it – but could rarely afford to have them developed! Dixons at the time were running a special free film promotion. Walk in to any branch and ask for a free print film and they’d just hand one over – you were expected of course to take it back to them for developing and printing, but 11 year olds don’t have much money. At least, I didn’t. Somewhere, amongst all of my many boxes from many moves over the years some of my original photos exist somewhere. Finding them would be great, but I really hid them in the safest of safe places!

When I was 15 I saved up enough money to buy a manual everything, metal bodied Zenith B. It cost me all of £30 which was a lot at the time, but I raised some of the money by selling Kodak Instamatics I bought from the mail order companies direct via the newspaper to members of the public. I think I made about £5 per camera, all thanks to the weekly Amateur Photographer magazine from which I learned a lot of my photographic skills.

The Zenit B was a great camera to learn about light with. In order to measure the exposure I used a hand held Selenium light meter which needed no batteries – an important feature for a cash strapped teenager. I’d read the light, then transfer the settings to the Zenit, and of course each exposure value had many different possible combinations of aperture and shutter speed. As light is the fundamental basis of all photography, getting this deep into the basics helped a lot with my understanding and later development of my picture taking.

Modern automatic electronic cameras really don’t give young photographers the same opportunities to learn about light in my opinion. Even consumer level dSLR cameras are harder to adjust instinctively, with very often a tiny dial – almost an afterthought – being responsible for setting both aperture and shutter speed. This is a pain in the neck as well as a lost opportunity to teach. Why do so few companies these days not copy Apple and think of ergonomics when they design their products?

But back to the story and on to sixth form. By then I was fairly comfortable behind the lens, and became the school photographer. Documenting school trips and community service projects students were involved in developed new skills in photographing people in a variety of conditions. Time available for taking photographs reduced a bit as I started working 12 hours a week operating a push button till on the check out at an Asda supermarket, but at least I had some money for a change. I moved into slide photography rather than prints because I was so sick of print labs ruining good pictures with overexposed silhouettes and underexposed landscapes that in negative were fine. But then, print labs only measure the light from the first pic in any film and if the others need different treatment, they don’t get it.

With a motorbike bought from savings accumulated from the part time job and summer holiday work I soon found I could go further afield to take photos, and trips to Wales brought me some wonderful landscapes to capture. Besides spending money on the motorbike and film, I also paid for my own driving lessons, so working at Asda might have been tiring and restrictive, but it gave me a lot too – not least a certain amount of independence.

University followed, and here I made a tiny bit of money photographing sports clubs and events – well, enough to pay for film but no more and not much. With my degree studies demanding more and more of my time, this was a fallow period for photography, but I kept it ticking along all the same. When I graduated in the middle of the Thatcher/Howe recession of 1981/82 I was lucky to have a second string to my bow because Ecologists were not really in any demand then. I started taking family photos by walking around a housing estate knocking on doors with my camera around my neck and asking if they wanted any pictures taking.

I was quite disorganised really, if they wanted the pics taken then I took them, but tomorrow I would be somewhere else. Similarly when the pics were ready, I made no appointments but knocked on their doors again and offered them the four pics I had taken for £3.25 each. Taking 9 sets of four pics on one 35mm film was quite profitable really – the cost price to me of a film and professional dev work worked out at about £15 and I was making about £80 in sales, leaving me with £65 profit per film. One house I knocked on the door of even asked me to photograph their wedding!

Wedding pics weren’t something I had thought of doing before, and they were on a budget and said instead of paying me cash, would I accept his old Olympus SLR and lenses? Well, at the time the Olympus was the lightest and best SLR out there at consumer prices (Nikon of course being aimed at Pro markets with prices well beyond what I could afford). I snapped them up on the offer.

Because I had no clue what to photograph at a wedding, I decided to ask them what they wanted. I made a list of all the pics that were important to them, including the names of the people they wanted me to capture, and ended up with a shooting sheet that over later years developed into the most wonderful of sales aids. By taking only pictures that people told me they wanted, each one was a guaranteed sale! I still don’t understand why so many photographers imagine they know better what the couple wants than the couple themselves do.

I became quite a prolific user of film and enjoyed the work, I even won a Hasselblad large format camera which was a beautiful piece of equipment, which I sadly no longer have. It had beautiful ergonomics though, fantastic standard of finish, and could take wonderful pictures – but it was yet another manual only camera! I seem to get on well with those.

The next seven years passed quickly. I didn’t make much money, and eventually the lack of any intellectual stimulation made me look for other things to do. As a photographer I was quite successful I suppose, winning the L’Oreal Silver Award for hair fashion photography, becoming Chairman of the London Portrait Group and elected to the National Council of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

The main thing I learned was that no matter how good you are at taking pictures, to succeed in a photography business you need capital behind you, and you need to be able to make money in all 12 months of the year; social photography (ie portraits and weddings) is almost non-existent between December and April, and they’re the months that help you make a small fortune – out of a larger one, naturally!

Now, my photography is purely for pleasure, that’s how I like it, and that’s how it’s going to stay.