My interest in photography began the Christmas after my 15^th birthday when I got my first 35mm SLR camera. I quickly became obsessed. The following year I received a darkroom kit and my father converted his office into a darkroom, which started my journey into film processing and darkroom printing.

Then followed 2 college courses studying photography where my interests started moving towards large format studio photography. When I left college, I worked for a commercial photographic studio in Tonbridge as an assistant where we photographed anything from cars to conservatories. I have fond memories of learning a lot and very long hours. From there I had a couple of other jobs then at the age of 23 I started Oyster Picture Framing and continue to run this business today.

Photography took a bit of a back seat in the late 90s and early 2000s. In 2011 I decided to make a wooden roll film camera and that drew me back into shooting film and I continued shooting that camera and I think a variant of it for the rest of 2011. By 2012 I was itching to buy a proper medium format camera: my Bronica SQA was purchased in February 2012 and this was my main camera until 2022/3. I also shot some 35m and dabbled in some 5×4 large format.

I made my first home made camera in mid 2018, it was a sliding box camera which used my 5 x 4 cut film holders. A little while after I made a larger version which was 8 x 8. I didn’t shoot this very much because it was a bit awkward to carry around.

In 2022/3 I had very low photographic output and thought I had lost my way a bit. By Christmas 2023 I decided to make a panoramic pinhole camera shooting paper negatives 10 x 4 (half a sheet of 10 x 8 printing paper). It took a while to iron some light leak issues, but I thoroughly enjoyed shooting this throughout the year – I loved the format and its experimental nature. Christmas 2024 saw the creation of a wooden pinhole camera with a ratio of 16:9 which is the same as that used in social media stories and reels, Which is my current go to camera, a joy to play with and another challenge as regard to portrait tall format.