My Journey — Where It Started
I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I was going to become a photographer.
It was actually more of a very big, and not particularly subtle, push from my friends.
Back then I worked ridiculous hours. Long days. Seven days a week. I had always worked hard and I don’t think I really questioned it. There was always something that needed doing and I just got on with it.
My friends could see it though.
One person in particular was June Skeggs, or Nanny as we call her. June was staying with us from England at the time and she had a front row seat to just how much I worked.
She kept telling me I needed something else.
Something I loved doing simply because I loved doing it.
Not work.
Not another responsibility.
Something for me.
And June can be very persuasive.
Actually, persistent might be a better word.
She pushed and pushed.
Looking back now, I am incredibly grateful she did.
There was just one small problem with June’s plan.
She wanted me to find something that would get me away from working all the time.
Instead, she introduced me to something else I could become completely obsessed with.
I’m not sure that was quite what she had in mind.
I had always loved looking
The photography was new.
The looking wasn’t.
I have always noticed things.
Light. Clouds. Colour. Little details that other people seemed perfectly capable of walking straight past.
When I was a child I was fascinated by those great shafts of sunlight that break through the clouds. I called them God’s rays. I would stop and look at them.
I still do.
Colour has always done the same thing to me.
It stops me.
I didn’t understand any of that as being particularly important when I first picked up a camera. I certainly wasn’t thinking about style or fine art or what might eventually make my work recognisable.
I just knew I loved looking.
Photography gave all of that looking somewhere to go.
Suddenly I had a reason to stop for longer.
Why had that caught my attention?
Was it the light?
The colour?
The shape?
Was there something happening in one small corner that was more interesting than the whole big view?
I became completely absorbed by it.
And pretty quickly I realised I didn’t just want a record of where I had been.
I wanted to make a photograph that showed somebody else what had stopped me.
I wanted them to see what I saw.
That is still one of the biggest reasons I photograph today.
Once I started, I wanted to know everything
I am not very good at doing things by halves.
Once photography grabbed me, that was it.
I wanted to understand the camera properly.
I wanted to understand light.
I wanted to know why one image worked and another one didn’t.
Why could two people stand in exactly the same place and make completely different photographs?
Why did experienced photographers see things I wasn’t seeing yet?
And how could I get better?
Much better.
Photography was supposed to be my escape from work and suddenly I was reading, learning, editing, practising and thinking about photographs constantly.
I loved it.
At that point I photographed almost anything that caught my attention.
Landscapes. Wildlife. Mountains. Water. Trees. Ice. Sunrises. Sunsets.
Everything.
I didn’t have a style.
I didn’t think I needed one.
I was learning.
And I think that period of photographing lots of different things was really important because I had to work out what actually held me.
You can’t know that at the beginning.
You have to go and look.
One thing I did know
There was something from my business life that I understood very clearly.
Many years earlier I had been taught that if you want to become very good at something, surround yourself with people who are already among the best at it.
That lesson had stayed with me.
So once I realised photography mattered to me, I decided I wasn’t going to spend years trying to work everything out alone.
I wanted to learn properly.
I wanted to find people whose work I respected and learn from them.
That decision eventually led me to Mark Gray for landscape photography and Chris Bray for wildlife, and later to Tony Hewitt and Dr Les Walkling, along with shorter periods learning from Christian Fletcher and Tom Putt.
But that came later.
At the beginning, I was just hungry to learn.
I wanted to become the best photographer I was capable of becoming.
I still feel exactly the same way now.
Slowly, things started to appear
Looking back at those early photographs now is interesting.
The work is very different from what I make today, but I can see little clues.
Colour was already important.
So were patterns.
Texture.
Lines.
Reflections.
The relationship between things.
And increasingly, the less obvious part of a landscape started to interest me more than the obvious one.
At the time I didn’t know that would eventually lead me towards aerial photography.
I certainly didn’t know I would become fascinated by salt fields, shallow water, strange mineral colours and landscapes that could almost stop looking like landscapes altogether.
None of that was planned.
I just kept following what interested me.
That has probably been one of the most important things I have done.
And June is still watching
June is back in England now, but she still follows my photography.
She sees the posts, the new work, the exhibitions and everything that has happened since those early days.
And I know she gets quite a lot of pleasure from the fact that she was behind the start of it.
She should.
I probably wouldn’t have begun without that big push.
Photography has since taken me all over the world.
It has introduced me to wonderful people.
It has given me some fairly ridiculous adventures.
It has taken me into aircraft with the doors off, across salt lakes, into freezing conditions, up mountains and into landscapes I never imagined I would see.
It has also made me look much more closely at places right under my nose.
Most importantly, it has given me something I value more and more as I get older.
Curiosity.
There is always something else to learn.
Something else to notice.
Something else that makes me stop and think, look at that.
Back in 2017 I didn’t know where any of this was heading.
I just knew I had found something I loved.
And June, watching from England all these years later, still gets to say:
“I started that.”
And she did.
Mind you, she may have created a monster.
