With engineering no longer an option due to failed exams, photography was my next choice of ‘career.’ There followed a three-year state-sponsored skive that, over the next ten years, furnished me with posts in Applied Photography (… as a tool in research and industry) at Imperial College, Guy’s Hospital and British Steel.



At British Steel, my boss and I started making short films on the research projects that were underway in the lab. Filming now became part of my DNA – a swing away from pure photography. In 1977 I left British Steel to spend three months in Alaska with a colleague making a documentary on glacial recession, logistically supported by a University of London expedition team. The film ended up on TV, and effectively started my career as a cameraman/sometime-producer/sometime-director… and only sometimes getting paid for any of it. Like other creative endeavours, the film industry is awash with hopefuls trying to break in with a good story, and many of them seemed to gravitate towards me for a freebie at the camera end; me who, if I had a reputation at all, it was clearly for being a bit of a soft touch when there was travel involved. Consequently I had more than my fair share of adventures in some obscure corners of the world, but with little to show for it all at the bank. So after 25 years of enjoying a freedom I didn’t deserve and couldn’t afford, something had to give. What did, painfully, and me now with a wife, a mortgage and three cats, was my career as a film-maker. So a Microsoft engineering course followed which, before I’d even finished it, led to ten years on network systems in the NHS. Finally an engineer-of-sorts, with a regular income. But I missed – and still miss – those intense periods of teamwork on a film project, the seat-of-the-pants problem-solving, that late-night phone call: “Mike, do you fancy three weeks in St Lucia?” (that one actually happened!).

On retiring from the NHS in 2010 and moving to Suffolk, I was able to take up photography again, essentially as an amateur, and to build a website with my best travel - and other - pictures from the past 30 years or so. Not so much classical landscapes as quirky compositions that tell a story of time and place, or as memories for my fading years (I’m 75. I should’ve started earlier.) or just because I felt it made a nice picture. Any fiddling around in Photoshop I usually keep to a minimum, but I used to joke that if any of my pictures should ever be mistaken for an Ansel Adams’ I’d die happy.  But not yet.