Photography

I think I must have spent the first thirty years of my life with no great or lasting interest in photography. Like most people, I only ever took pictures either on holiday or if there was a special occasion like a birthday or wedding.

My cousin Matt, however, went on a world gap year trip and came back with some nice shots and (what seemed at the time) a burning ambition to become a professional travel photographer. It turned out that while his ambition soon faded, he’d managed to truly inspire me!

It was following this inspiration and a forthcoming walking holiday in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco that led me to getting a prosumer type camera (HP850). Considering the limitations I did come back with some relatively nice pictures. For the first time, the pictures were at least equal to my memories of an amazing place. Previous holiday pictures I’d taken using a snappy camera of the grand canyon or the pyramids or the highlands of Scotland always failed to do justice to my memories. This was at least a step in the right direction.

In 2005 I decided that photography was going to be a more serious hobby and I looked around for some better kit. After a little bit of research I eventually went for the canon 20d with the kit lens. In hindsight, I may have made an error here. I’d spent all my money on the camera and not thought about the quality of the lens. It was almost a year before I managed to get a decent bit of glass. Little did I know then that cameras come and go but lenses are for life! At least now I was taking reasonable holiday pictures, but I still barely used my camera between trips.

The next step in my photography journey was the online social network of Flickr. Initially I was juts looking for somewhere to store pictures online and show them to my friends. Increasingly, of course, I got drawn into sharing ideas and seeing more possiblitites. Before I got into Flickr, I’d pretty much never taken any pictures of my home city of London. That’s just what tourists do. But after seeing all the intriguing and original images of London on Flickr I got the motivation to start looking for all the interesting shots out there waiting to be found.

During 2008 I completed ‘Project 366‘ (taking a picture every day) which meant that I carried a camera with me all the time. London, and in particular my walk to work through the city, increasingly become my photographic target. Doing this project meant committing to taking a photograph every single day. Being forced to take the camera out and come up with a wealth of ideas really challenged me to look for new shots of the same subjects and to look for the unusual. I now look at my own city in a whole new and positive way.