On Being a Portrait Photographer

Me aged 24 in New York 1989

Becoming a Photographer...

The year was 1989 and I was in New York studying Photography...

The cameras were very basic; using them was matter of simply coming to grips with Aperture, Shutter and ISO, which was great as we had plenty of time (2 years) to concentrate on creating the image.

This meant learning how to draw realistically.

I nearly fell off my chair when they told us this part of the course would be exactly half of it! Up until then my efforts at drawing what I saw, ranged from OK to total crap.

I soon learned why honing this skillset was so important to our image making and those of us who opted in to the drawing part of the course quickly surpassed the others in terms of the power of our images.

Learning to draw meant an intense study of light and form, design and the importance of negative space. It meant we had a serious understanding of these things that make up so much of image making.

I immersed myself in my photography and loved every minute of it.

We learned to use a large format camera – the ones where you stand and hide under a cloak to photograph – the quality of the image produced by these cameras blew my mind. We printed our own black and white images and learned through studying the American master, Ansel Adams the intricacies of tonal range.

My tutor – an incredible Afro-American photographer named Louis Draper, took me under his wing and I spent hours in that dark room perfecting my images.

I learned to pose people and yet get a natural expression – that’s an art in itself and one, if I do say so myself, that I excel at.

I found this image of me a while ago while sorting through some old boxes. It brought back a host of memories of that time, some disturbing and shocking – New York was a dangerous place at the time, and some hilarious and filled with fun.

It's a moment in time, taken by a classmate. Unposed and raw in emotion.

It’s hard to believe that I was once so erm, young.

It also makes me realise how amazing it is to have these memories stored in a picture, to be released in a flood at the opening of an old cardboard box.

We change so much over a lifetime; don’t let the many stages of you or your children’s evolution fade into a distant hazy memory, get them captured naturally - book a sitting with me now!