ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER

I never particularly liked photography. Each birthday my parents would ask me whether I'd like a camera, and I said no, because I thought the idea of photography boring. Little did I know how radically that thought would change!

 

My love for general photography, and my love for fashion and portraiture photography, began at different times.

 

My initial spark for general photography came about during a family trip to France in 2009. I took my family's small camera with me that year. Up until that point, I had always used cameras simply to document things and events, instead of using it for art. However, on holiday, I started to experiment with angles during our day trips. By the end of our stay, I was completely hooked and decided to ask for a proper camera the next time my birthday came around.

 

My love for fashion and portraiture photography developed during my GCSE Art project on the subject of Art Nouveau. I had to take some pictures of my sister in a long, flowing dress, and then create a painting based on one of the shots. I found that I enjoyed taking the photos a great deal more than doing the artwork, so I decided to set up some more shoots, with different people and different themes.

 

As my school didn’t teach photography, I began by teaching myself. I preferred keeping it separate anyway, as I didn't much like school and tended to develop a dislike for anything I was being taught! I began approaching people at school, even if we had never spoken before, and invited them to model for photo shoots. It was only for fun at first - a personal hobby. After a while though, I had to start thinking about whether I wanted to go to university and perhaps study the craft in more depth. After a long period of contemplation, I realized that I wanted to do nothing else but photography. It was the one thing in life that I was utterly passionate about!

 

After a great deal of research into various universities, I made some choices and applied to several. At first, I either didn't get a place at the ones I wanted, due to my school grades being too low, (dyslexia mixed with the fact that I have always been arty, not academic) or the ones I did get a place for, I wasn’t hugely interested in attending. I was about to give up, but late into my gap year, I thought I'd have one last search. That’s when I found the course at University of South Wales. 'Photography For Fashion & Advertising BA (Hons)'. It looked fantastic, and unlike most of the other university course web pages, they had examples of students’ coursework to view – and it was the quality of work I saw which really attracted me. Unfortunately I was too late for the main interviews, but I contacted admissions to see if I might be able to get a last minute place. If not, then I’d wait another year. Luckily, I didn’t have to. I managed to get an informal interview with one of the course teachers at the start of the summer. The interview went very well, and amazingly, I was given an offer on the spot.

 

Although I had already received a few commissions before I started as a student, university is where I began to expand on what I was doing. I learnt a lot, from lighting, to what makes an image good. I also began building up some professional contacts and gained project experiences that would have been much harder to achieve had I not been in college. These experiences included shooting for business clients, communicating with and shooting for designers, working in creative teams, as well as designing, shooting and producing publications, etc.

During my time at USW, my work improved vastly, and I picked up some amazing commissions along the way - such as: shooting backstage and runway for Sebastian Professional on several occasions, shooting two runways at the Saatchi Gallery for London Fashion Week, an album cover for Faith Bekoe’s new single ‘Wounded Army’, and many more projects. You can find examples of this work and more, on the website!

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After university, I had to think about where I wanted to take my career. I thought at first that I wanted to join the industry (no matter how hard that was) and become a commercial fashion photographer. So to start off, I decided to do some interning in London. After a lot of searching for the right jobs, I managed to get myself a place interning for two companies: Underground Shoe and PHOENIX Magazine. For half the week I was at Underground, daily shooting products for their store, as well as studio and location fashion shoots with models. For the other half of the week I was at PHOENIX, handling social media, image call-ins and doing the odd few shots for their Instagram. I worked with both of these companies for a contracted three months and gained a huge amount of knowledge and experience in that time. However, living in London eventually made me realize that it was not where I wanted to be. It was too stressful and diehard for me. People were working themselves to death on hardly any pay for a tiny fraction of a chance that they might or might not get picked up by the industry. I couldn't keep up with this and, to be honest, didn't want to. I realized then that I would rather stay in my home town and become a freelance photographer.

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After the three months in London were up, I came back home, started up my own business and began picking up commissions. Although fashion and portrait photography was my specialism, I made a decicion to work for whatever was commissioned. I had a wide range of different photographic techniques (event, product, music, etc) and I was always happy whatever I was shooting. During this time, I photographed fashion dolls for Kunaka Kids and shot everything currently on their website. Among others, I also picked up various commissions, such as shooting for one-handed concert pianist Nicolas McCarthy, behind the scene shots on the soundtrack recording for Vanessa Bailey's acclaimed short film 'Seeing Him', as well as a fashion shoot for designer Sarah Sheppard.

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(Last updated 2017)