Fifty years ago I started working as a freelance photographer. Using Leica, Hasselblad, Nikon and Linhof cameras – usually ilford films, Kodak chemistry, strobe lights and Devere darkroom stuff. Early digital equipment was used for simple testing and I loved the Polaroid neg/pos materials.

I had one of the first Mavica cameras and did commercial work with early Nikon Coolpix cameras – I did not like the digital work and as It usurped commercial photography, I moved away.

After a few years in the wilderness, I came back to photography to find so many changes it was as if I was on another planet. So many products had disappeared – Brovira, Dektol, Polaroid, Kodachrome, all gone – formulas are weaker and the price of everything is unreal. But digital work had not compensated in any way.

I looked deeper at some of the old techniques, mainly to get the costs down and in the process rediscovered wet plate, calotypes, carbon transfer and carbro. Platinum was now prohibitively expensive as a standard printing technique – I took up lith printing so I use up old stocks of paper, but colour work was my interest. I loved Cibachrome but what could replace that.

Colour carbon transfer seemed a logical step and I have spent a lot of time researching the Fresson process, but something was lacking.

I have always loved the work of Edward Curtis and his orotones (Curtones) are exciting to see – so with the wet plate collodion work I was doing , I started making orotones from wet plate negatives. I found that I saved money by making the print onto the glass by carbon transfer was much cheaper than silver emulsions; and then I moved to carbro.

Carbro means I can work in the darkroom, using negatives or colour transparencies to make prints, or a series of colour separations, which I can print directly onto bromides and then transfer to carbon tissue(s).

Originally I was only making gold orotones, but I have developed a range of other emulsions and varnishes so I can make a “base” in any tone or colour, not just “gold” – the barium sulphate was tricky, but it now works.

But what is new – my aim is to make colour prints onto glass and then present the image with the gold (or other material) backing – at present this means standard type colour separations on three (or more) negatives, then printing each from carbon transfer or carbro techniques onto the glass.

I am also working with other pallets of colour and with different lens designs to alter the brain washing of the last 800 years so I hope to see more reality in the images.

So that is where I am after the first 50 years – A lot to do in the next 50 years.