Once upon a time, long ago, I was a salesman. And it didn’t fit.
Then, I was a motorcycle despatch rider, and it fitted the part of me that loved (and still does love) motorbikes. But I really, really wanted to be a photographer.
Taking pictures of motorbikes was a fairly obvious, if relatively limited starting point. But it was a start.
What followed was an assortment of jobs on newspapers both large and small. I covered assignments ranging from plane crashes to pet of the week, from Premiership soccer to tiddly wink contests. Riots to rock stars. In a Spanish prison I photographed a pair of unsuccessful drug smugglers from Cheltenham. In Cheltenham, I photographed a pear. One thing’s for sure, if you work on newspapers for any length of time, then you’ll see, and photograph, pretty much everything.
Setting up in business in 1998, I still love the sheer variety of what I do. The photos I take at an export conference one day provide the ideas that go into a wedding the following Saturday. Tit for tat – the wedding photos give me inspiration for a magazine shoot three days later. Variety still is, the spice of life.