I have been taking photographs since the age of ten, when I started with a 120mm look-down Yashicamat. At least it had a light-metre and took close-up lenses, though I lost a number of hamsters while trying to photograph them in the garden. While I fiddled with the settings they just ran away, and when I looked up they had gone.
My mother had a darkroom and by 13 she had taught me the basics of processing film, printing with an enlarger and, in the process, spending a lot of her money on chemicals and paper. Thanks Prue.
By the time I worked for local papers I had moved on to a Nikon FM and was practised enough to process and print all the B&W photos needed for the week on my own in Prue’s dark-room. No complete failures in an 18-month stretch.
For my travel writing days I added another body – so I could take colour as well as black and white – and a couple more lenses. This classic kit was good enough for me for the next 20 years.
My travels tended to be way off-piste, so I needed to provide photos both for newspapers and colour images for magazines.
But film was difficult and film cameras fragile. My photos from a drive from Kenya to Zimbabwe were lost to a processing error using unfamiliar equipment in Harare. A dislodged reflex mirror meant that all my photos from a trip to Madagascar were blurred. A photo lab in Washington speckled snow across all my colour pictures from my travels in Guatemala and Loaded Magazine lost all my best slides of a drive from Farnham to Togo in a 2CV.
As soon as digital cameras became able to take photos as soon as you pressed the shutter I switched over. As the industry required I became familiar with Photoshop and comfortable using it.
Over the years my photos have appeared in countless newspapers and magazines, on the sides of Singaporean buses advertising tea, and – thanks to Alamy – many other places I can only guess of.
But the costs of early photography used to be outweighed by scarcity value and good rates of pay.
That’s sadly not the case now. Everyone with a half-decent phone can be a photographer and every decent tourist board provides good images for free. Royalties for pictures – especially in travel – are so small it no longer provides a noticeable income.
Whatever. I still like taking photos.