I was born in New Zealand and I spent my childhood there. I am the eldest of four and looking back on my time there compared with friends who grew up in the UK I feel incredibly lucky that I grew up without any of the influences that big cities have on children. My father is English and my mother Australian, and with that influence as children we understood from an early age, unlike many of our contemporaries, that there was a world that existed outside New Zealand. As children we travelled to Sydney to see my mothers family quite often, it was always very hot.  In the winter of 1981 my father took my brother and I to the Uk to visit his family, My brother Simon and I had couldn’t believe how cold and damp it was.

In 1983 I bought my first camera, a second hand Practica MTL3 with a standard glass 50mm lens in 1983, it weighed a ton and I rattled through hundreds of rolls of Agfa Black and white 100 asa film, I didn’t use colour film for years because it was to expensive to develop and print, and as I couldn’t develop and print it myself I stuck with black and white. The Practica camera was built like a tank and it survived many a ski accident and drunken evening at the Carlton Hotel in Christchurch. The Practica camera had a huge paddle shaped depth of field button on the side of the body which when pulled back gave you an exposure reading and a depth of field preview, and although it looked like something Dell boy would try and sell you it took fantastic pictures. My father bought me a tamron 70-100mm lens for my birthday and I could now take take pictures of the girls in the flat next door sunbathing from the roof of our house without being noticed, I had arrived, I was now a photographer.

Like most New Zealanders the travel bug bit me and I left New Zealand in February 1985. My trusty Practica and two lenses travelled to London for our big ‘OE’ (Overseas Experience) I met up with four Australians and together we bought a lime green Volkswagon Combi van from a Dutchman in Waterloo and headed off around Europe. The five of us spent five of the best months of our lives traveling around Europe, I still have the photographs I took on that amazing trip in a huge box in the loft of our house. How naive we were, I’m sure my two daughters will want to do something similar at some point and I’ll have to bite my tongue and let them go. My traveling companions had cameras, the two girls had Nikon compacts, I had my East German cast iron box with a hole in the front of it, and the two other guys had very stylish Canon cameras. Murray, one of the Aussie guys had a Canon AE1 program. I thought the Canon A series cameras were a breath of fresh air, likewise the fantastic Nikon F series. I knew that when I returned to the UK I was going to have trade in the tank for something with more bells and whistles with aperture priority at least.

So we all went our separate ways, I went back to stay with my Aunt in Chichester, the boys to Melbourne and the two girls back to Sydney. In Chichester my first stop was Whitby’s the camera shop with everything a broke aspiring photographer could want for. This I think was a pivotal moment for me – Nikon or Canon? What system best sits me, I couldn’t afford a train ticket to london let alone a new camera body. The months went by and in that time between returning from my trip at  the end of summer and December 1985 I had secured a job as a ski guide in Val D’Isere France. Two days before leaving on the coach for the next big adventure I went back to Whitby’s in Chichester and traded in my Practica for a gleaming new Canon AE1 program. About a thousand mountain scenes later I returned to London and set about deciding what on earth I was going to do with the rest of my life.

By 1986 New Zealand was in the grip of recession and although London was in the grip of ‘loadsa money’ things were rapidly hurtling down hill. I had been digging ditches for a landscape gardener since returning from my ski season in May but my photography life had changed beyond recognition. I had discovered medium format. With three weeks ditch digging wages I blew the whole lot on a Bronica ETRsi and although it seemed foolish at the time (as I had been lumbered with the combi van which badly needed a few grand spending on it) this new larger format totally changed the way I took photographs. Most of the London and world photographs I sell today were, and still are taken with that camera. It sits on a tripod most of the time, it’s a manual camera with no automatic settings and you look at the image in the viewfinder upside down. Before you click the shutter you’ve scratched your chin, fiddled with your filters, had a sandwich, scratched your chin again and the two or three  images you finally take are well thought out and generally spot on.

The years rolled by I was making good pocket money selling my photographs to image libraries taken with my trusty Bronica. In the days before full frame digital SLRs it was possible to make a good living as a stock photographer because demand for good images was high with so few photographers, comparatively, taking high end images. I tried my luck as a paparazzi photographer working for The big picture following celebs around at 2am hoping for the scoop. I never got the scoop although I was chased across Leicester Square one evening by one of Peter Stringfellow’s bouncers. Most of the press and paparazzi guys at that time had high end Canon and Nikon cameras with lenses zooming up to at least 400mm and I was still using my trusty AE1 program with a motor drive that chewed through film and batteries.

Digital photography hit me later than most of the pros largely due to the fact that I didn’t have any money. I was though scanning slides and negatives mostly for cataloguing purposes in order that I could make some sense of my mountain of 35mm film strips and medium format material. I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon D60 in 2002 and then it’s successor a 20D a year later. I must have shot about about 200 weddings on the D60, the autofocus was terrible, it hunted around for a fix in low light, skin tones were green, it would seize up just as the bride and groom would be walking down the isle, and it gobbled up battery power at an alarming rate. Luckily I had invested in a fast mac desktop and I was able to correct most things in photoshop. The 20d was much better and Canon had ironed out most of the oddities the D60 would throw at you. I’m very glad I didn’t buy the D30!

I have now completely embraced digital, I still use film occasionally and just about all my gallery images you can see on my site are shot on film. I have two Canon 1ds mark 11 cameras which are terrific pieces of kit and bags of L lenses and other studio gear. I still have my trusty Bronica. Much better working on a mac in an airy studio than breathing in all those smelling chemicals in a cellar. It’s easy to feel nostalgic about film, particularly black and white film, but high end digital improves workflow to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine doing half the stuff that we all do now with an analogue set up. Clients too understand the immediacy of digital, they know that they can see proofs very quickly after a shoot. I haven’t got to play with the new Canon 1ds mark 3 yet, if I’ve got time next week I might have a look at one at Calumet!

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