My interest in photography dates back to my childhood when an uncle introduced me to processing.  I well remember my first effort.  It was a roll of very cheap film and unbeknown to me was not film at all but paper and produced paper negatives so I never did get any proper prints.

I did get the right material the next time and managed to develop a satisfactory set of negatives.  The next trick was to print these onto paper, which I did by the contact method.  The result was a number of very small prints but they were OK and provided sufficient impetus to pursue the hobby further.  Subsequently I worked in the photographic industry as a teenager spending three and a half years in Fleet Street for what was the largest press and commercial photographic company in the world at that time.

My first 18 months were spent in the negative library waiting for an opening to upgrade to photo-operator assistant and I spent the next 2 years assisting in photographing many major exhibitions in London, the most memorable ones being the Motor Show and the Ideal Home.

My first real camera was a Zeiss 2.25 x 3.25 Graphic plate camera.  I quickly outgrew this and soon purchased a Rolliflex, which I still possess.  I then went in for a Nikon F3T with a set of lens and a Toyo 5 x 4 cut film/plate camera.  I subsequently sold the latter and bought a Hasselblad.  Then when I felt that film had, had its day I sold the lot, including my entire darkroom, and bought my first digital camera, an Agfa.  This sufficed for a couple of years until my latest purchase, a year ago, of a Minolta A1 and a Mecablitz flash unit.

All this experience became more than useful much later in life when I started writing technical articles for the high power music industry, mainly reviewing equipment and exhibitions.

Recently I have used this expertise to good effect writing articles for Clocks Magazine and Model Engineer.  I am also able to illustrate the Surrey Raynet web site with pictures of our setup at events.