About
A long time ago I did some unpaid “work” for a photographer in London. He did portraits and some fashion in a nice studio in Kensington. I moved lighting around, made drinks, chatted to models and customers but mainly just watched and listened. He (they really as he had two assistants) used Rolleiflex and Mamiyaflex twin lens reflex cameras and assorted 35mm stuff, Leicas mainly I remember but there might have been Nikons as well. After a bit I got to take the odd photo but I don’t think any of them were kept. It was only a few months really and for odd periods of the day and then I started working full-time for an art sales business. They gave me a camera as a thank-you. It was a Leica III (IIIf I think) with a 5 cm Summicron lens and rather beat-up; film transport was dicey, focus was a bit tight and there was a scratch on the front element. Nevertheless it produced some wonderful shots, all black and white, and I managed to get the use of a darkroom for developing and printing. It was my only camera for 4 years and then I got a secondhand Rollei and did some part-time paid portrait work. Sadly after a bit the art sales business folded and I joined a friend in a property development business. The Leica got part-exchanged for a Spotmatic and the Rollei languished in a cupboard, the property business flourished, children were born and photography, except for “snaps”, sort of faded into the background.
I know what it takes to be a computer programmer. It’s necessity. Fast-forward 7 years and I’m sitting in my opulent office running a fairly big property company. I have a new computer on my desk, it’s 1977, and it doesn’t work. All it has is a white dot at the left hand bottom line of the VDU screen. I’ll tell that story here one day. So I learned to program it and things like it in all sorts of different ways. Soon after, the property company was taken over by a larger group and I became involved with manufacturing and retailing as well as property. But it was all meetings and very little hands-on work. In 1985 I do a great leap to Freedom. Freedom is a suite in a business centre by the river in Battersea and it’s being self-employed to do what comes along. And what comes along is IT, programming, hardware sales, some property dealing, bit of journalism and guess what? Photography. My near neighbours were commercial photographers with seductively inexpensive facilities. In hindsight I shouldn’t have bought all the Mamiya ZE gear but it was top quality and sadly discontinued rather quickly so I found myself at the birth of Canon’s EOS concept needing a new system.
I wish I could say that I made lots of money from photography but the enjoyment has always been far larger than the profit. Unfortunately I am essentially lazy and not very self-disciplined and while I can be pushed around by academic and commercial IT clients and have no problem charging for what I do in that area, I have always been reticent about what I charge for images. But now that I am semi-retired, having given up IT, photography has become an indulgence and only a little more commercial than a hobby. One of the hobby aspects is that I’ve been able to make a collection of mechanical cameras, learned to repair them and use a great many of them. An outcome of having been a computer geek for years is that understanding the progress of digital photographic equipment and its limitations has come to be second-nature and you will no doubt be getting a lot of self-opinionated posts from me in that area as well as something that is useful or challenging or amusing or might be just plain rubbish.
