My Journey - Part Two

Last week, I shared a bit about the very start of my photography journey, on a coach around Europe, trying out my newly purchased piece of kit around the various imperial capitals…

Now luckily I came back from that trip and somehow I just picked up information, tried to learn stuff, and a friend of mine from university, the infamous Joshua Blevins, was working for 4R’s at the time, which was an IT company that was pulling data from runners using a team in Ghana. And I ended up working, indirectly, for Bupa, doing the Great North Run (and then made a bit of money which was great!) All of a sudden I bought kit and I got my first 700-200, which is still around somewhere, not working very well (think I dropped it!). 

And that’s where it all started, realising I could make a bit of money, and then working for 4R’s more by doing things all over the North, Manchester 10k, Sheffield 10k. 

Then I slipped into Flickr, where I was putting all my images up, Flickr was a fantastic community at the time, and it opened my door to this community of photographers, and I remember falling into a thing called Exposure Leeds that John Eland had set up and it was meeting at the old Broadcasting House in Leeds, and the list of people that I still speak to at times, or at least see their stuff coming through, or at least I’m in contact with from that group of photographers, is still now, you know, like 18 years later, I mean I was at Steve Cabot’s 50th the other day.I remember meeting him in the Dry Dock, with all his landscape gear with him, but it was a great experience, and that just kind of started my kind of journey, and Shelley, I met Shelley there, and Rob, the rocking vicar and that was where it all started.

It was a case of just gleaning information off all these people, and starting that journey, and little did I realise at that time, and I mean even arguably, you know, five or six years after that, I never saw it as a career, I never saw that as where things were going, but that’s where it started!