My lifelong affair with photography began over 40 years ago, having left school at the tender age of 15. My first job was with a Kodak processing company in Nottingham, processing B/W film for Boot’s and various other chemists in and around the city.


It was during these formative years that my love of photography was well and truly cemented, it was also during this time that I attended the Nottingham School of Art for photography. Little did I realise at that time what an influence these early years would have throughout my later life.

By the spring of 1972 I was working offshore as a professional diver and over the next few years worked and dived in many of the world’s oceans and seas. It was this environment that rekindled my interest in photography, as there was an ever increasing requirement to record on film the condition and state of many of the structures on the seabed. Not only were photographs required but in the more remote locations this also resulted in on-site processing and printing which was generally carried out using E6 along with Cibachrome printing.

Now we come to the interesting part... The ‘Digital Age’ Thanks to the military and those nice people at Intel we now have digital cameras, scanners and a vast array of optical/digital devices and not to forget of course ‘Photoshop’. I’ve heard o lot of people bemoaning the demise of traditional photography and criticising digital photography and in particular ‘Photoshop’, I for one find these criticisms’ totally unfounded, irrational and somewhat Luddite in nature. It should come as no surprise that most of the tools in ‘Photoshop’ are named after their counterparts in traditional photography and I for one know that there was as much fudging went on in traditional photography/processing as there is in digital photography, if not more!!

The future! Well from a personal perspective I just can’t wait to see what’s around the corner. I just love this technology and as long as I retain my marbles or most of them! Then I’ll encompass it with an open mind.

In conclusion I have to say that photography as played an important part in my life so far, and like so many other things in life, it was mostly accidental! I only wish that digital photography had existed 40 years ago! It would have made life so much more interesting and exciting, one could only imagine where we would be today?