My love of photography has been with me since childhood. I remember using a camera to photograph the church at Harrow on the Hill when I was six years old and my surprise at the strange picture that resulted. I had pointed the camera upwards so as to see all the roof, but the recorded perspective I saw later on the small print was not what I thought I had remembered. I have wrestled with the illusions that optics deliver ever since.

School was not a happy time. I was very good at mathematics and sciences but yearned to paint and draw – whenever I could I would  go to the centre of London and visit the museums and galleries. I spent a lot of time in libraries. A book that had a strong influence on me when I was ten was “This is War” by David Douglas Duncan. The images have been with me ever since – I then knew I wanted to be a photographer and use Nikkor lenses.

I left school at 15 and was offered a “sandwich course” with a computer company “LEO computers” – I was a technical assistant in the new research department and I could go to college three days a week to “finish” my education – to my joy, the college was “Ealing School of Art and Design”. I did not know it but Freddy Mercury was a student there in the 60s (I later photographed Queen when they played in Brighton). The college has an important photography department. I was supposed to be studying maths and physics – I did go to a few maths lessons over the next three years but learnt modelling, sculpture, photographic techniques and photography history. I also did well with the computer company and we pioneered early integrated circuits and ground-breaking compiling languages. But the plug was pulled from the British computer industry – all the talented engineers went to Hong Kong or America – some of the scientists asked me to join them in new ventures (a few became Billionaires) but I fell in love with Film making and motorcycles.

I talked my way into the thriving Film industry based all around West London. As a film “extra” I could earn more in a day than my friends made in a week – but I could learn more as an actor, the problem was that I could not act, so I stood in for a stunt job crashing a motorcycle in the film series “The Saint” with Roger Moore – I did it well and I earnt a full Equity card as a stunt man after two more contracts.

But production and filming is what I wanted to do, so I talked my way into the lowest of the low job as a third assistant on a second unit (tea boy) filming – sometimes doing continuity shots with the big Polaroid cameras.

In 1971 the British film industry was wrapped up when the tax subsidies went. Many studios closed  – I did some work in TV studios but it was not film.

I was determined to be a professional photographer, I went to college studied and got certification for technical work and some experience at the London School of Printing in film direction, editing and production. I got freelance photographic work from advertising agencies and some corporate clients. I moved to Cambridge, but was now too far from agencies to be called in so I started teaching photography to American Air Force personnel on their G.I. bill. I also got regular work from Cambridge University and the colleges.

While I was working around Cambridge, I got involved in computer sciences again. A good friend was a chap called Clive Sinclair who was designing early small computers (that did not work very well) and calculators (that did not work at all) we talked about the future for very large scale integrated circuits and I designed a concept for what I called a “chiprix” a silicon matrix for a sensor for an optical device (yes, I invented the digital camera in 1969) – Clive said there was no future in it so I started to think of ways of making lenses for cameras without using glass.

I also started working on ideas for other materials for photographic “papers”. One idea I am still trying to perfect is using magnetite in a gelatine emulsion to record the “image” with magnetic resonance so blind people can “see” an image through their fingertips. Interestingly the Nobel prize for medicine was given in 2021 which exactly fits my concept.

Good photographic commissions came in so I was too busy to follow up other ideas.

I worked as a professional photographer constantly from 1974 to 1985. My life was changing and I moved to Edinburgh and started a new chapter. In Edinburgh I was enchanted by the pioneers of photography in the 1840s and I also met some artists and scientists working on Platinum printing, I gave my only big old, 20x30cm camera to one artist (he has only just paid me the platinum prints he promised me for it).

Three years in Scotland scratching for work and then back to London. I found a lot of work from clients wanting photographic work in Africa and the Middle East – I have made many trips to Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Saudi and the Emirates. From 1975 to 1990 I made over twenty trips often staying for months at a time and working on many projects for film companies and  education and training for government contracts. I tried to set up the Sudanese Film Industry with friends there, but Samuelsson wanted a huge deposit for the equipment rental (very wisely) so it fizzled out.

In 1990 I was in Bahrain – the war (Desert Storm) was just about to start – so I returned to the UK and have not been back since.

A brand new start was needed. So with a growing family, we moved to the South of France with the plan to start a residential photographic school.

We found a tenth century ruin in a small village, Nizas, in Languedoc. I spent the next ten years doing odd jobs to earn money and working on our weird home. But my ideas for a photo school changed as the internet was starting. I made our first website in 1995 – this was simply to talk about our offering of accommodation for the photo school, but suddenly the whole of Microsoft and other Internet publishing companies wanted to come to France and stay with us for a rural vacation.
So I made more websites to offer this, and started one of the first blogs.

In those daft days I sometimes got over three million visitors a day – we were overwhelmed and I ended up with the biggest Internet rental website in France. It got even more silly, we got involved in TV programs, filming and property sales – newspapers in America wrote about us and more people came to the websites.

Then the Internet grew up and big corporations moved in. At the same time I was told by the French authorities I could not trade in vacation rentals as I did not have a licence. So it all suddenly stopped.

We now have a big house with a lot of accommodation, so we started our own Bed and Breakfast business and I made a new darkroom and started researching some of the old processes again.

So here we are today, (May 24th 2024) and we are starting all over again – what will the next fifty years bring?