How I Got Started in Photography

I’ve been involved in photography for nearly 40 years, going right back to college. But my interest started long before that, when I was a little boy.

My dad used to take photographs. He’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t the world’s greatest photographer, but he sparked something in me. I had my own camera from around the age of seven or eight and I remember one particular holiday in the 1970s when we went into a camera shop.

Dad bought a zoom lens. I can’t remember every detail now, but I do remember being surprised that he bought it. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, and it was quite a big, impulsive purchase for him. That lens absolutely fascinated me.

Suddenly, I could photograph the same scene in completely different ways. I could take a wide picture, zoom right in, change the angle and change the perspective. I’d just play around and experiment. Looking back, I learned an enormous amount about photography from that one lens.

In those days, of course, there was no digital photography. I used to take slide film on holiday, and when we got home we’d have to wait for the film to be processed. It might be a week before I found out what I’d actually photographed. We’d put the slides in a projector and see the holiday up on the wall. Sometimes a picture would remind me of a moment I’d almost forgotten.

There was something really special about looking at photos on slides. It would be a family event. It might be on a Saturday evening after dinner, and we’d wait for it to get dark outside. Dad would set the projector up, and we would all sit around in the chairs and watch the slides as they popped up.

It was slightly time-consuming; Dad had to find each slide and put it in. But each picture was really special because, unlike today where we take lots and lots of photos of the same scene, in those days there’d just be one image of that particular event.

So, if we went out for the day, we might take one picture of that walk and maybe one picture of a museum or something like that that we went to see, but it wouldn’t be every 10 minutes like people do these days.

That family slideshow is one of my strongest memories of growing up and was so much more exciting than watching the TV!

I wouldn’t swap digital photography for film now. Digital is brilliant, and I take loads of photographs. But there was something magical about waiting to see what you’d got. Every time you pressed the shutter it cost money, so you thought about whether the picture was worth taking. You didn’t take 20 versions of everything. You might take just one and hope it worked.

What I perhaps didn’t realise at the time was the fact that we’re shooting on film. Growing up shooting film meant that every picture had to be perfect, as there was no Photoshop. This was a really good educational system for me because I couldn’t just fix it afterwards; I had to get it right in the first place, which is something that still stays ingrained within me today.

The thing that really changed my life, though, happened at school. I struggled terribly with reading, writing and concentration. At school in the 1970s and 80s, nobody really understood why. I came away thinking I wasn’t very bright. My best mates were near the top of the class and I was near the bottom. That’s how I saw myself at the time.

Many years later, I had gone to realise that I was dyslexic and almost certainly ADHD.

But there was one thing I absolutely loved: photography. Every year our school had an activities week, and every single year I chose photography. We’d go out with black-and-white film, take pictures, come back, develop the film and make our own prints. I loved the whole process. I could happily spend hours doing it.

When I was about 15, I didn’t really know what I was going to do next. A levels weren’t looking likely. Then we had a careers day and someone came in from South Notts College to talk about a photography course. Until that moment, it hadn’t really occurred to me that something I loved so much could actually become my job.

There was a problem. I needed four O levels to get onto the course, and I wasn’t being put forward for four. But suddenly I had a reason to work. Something clicked. I worked incredibly hard, got the O levels (just!) I needed and earned my place at college.

And I loved it. I was only 16 or 17, but I’d get up early, catch the bus in and work as hard as I could. For the first time, I felt like I was doing exactly what I wanted to do.