Big G - I ❤️ Coffee
I’m not a good photographer
Really? So you want to know something about me? Okay – I’m young, handsome, athletic, charismatic, living with an angel, and I excel at everything I do. Actually, not all of that is true. In fact, now I come to think of it, only the angel part is true – though how she puts up with me is a huge mystery.
My photographic journey started in the early 80s when I was just 16 years old, I managed to save my birthday money and pocket money to purchase my first camera, a second hand 35mm Olympus OM2n SLR together with a Zuiko silver nose 50mm 1.2 prime lens, I loved that camera.
It was my love of motorsport that initiated my camera purchase, I eagerly travelled around the Midlands in my mates Ford Escort mk2 Mexico in pursuit of rally cars to shoot, after a quick but steep learning curve I eventually started to capture some reasonably good images.
I was enrolled at the local college, training to get qualified in the building trade, and consequently my mum used to give me dinner money everyday to buy chips or a pie, however, I needed to buy rolls of black & white film frequently to support my new hobby, needless to say I was really skinny in my college years.
I was an avid reader of Amateur Photographer magazine in the 80s, and I was sick of paying Jessops to develop my rolls of film, and worse, the waiting time of around 7 days just to see if you had captured any good images. I saw an advert for a black and white developing tank together with chemicals to allow me to home develop my own rolls of film, the advert made it sound so easy so I thought I would give it try.
To load the roll of film inside the developing tank requires complete darkness, I initially tried this in my bedroom, but completely destroyed 2 rolls of 36 shot film, I eventually, started climbing into the loft to do this as the loft was completely black at night time with no light leakage and I soon started to get good results.
With the best rally car photographs I captured, I sent the negatives away that I had hand developed and had 10” x 8” Black and White prints made, I waited about a week, and went to collect my pictures from Jessops, I was blown away by how good the images looked and had actually turned out.
I started selling these prints to the drivers of the various rally cars during the Scrutineering before the actual races, I was getting £10 per print, which was a lot of money for me, especially as my apprentice wage was only £25 for a 45 hour week. I was hooked and was getting requests for photos by most of the drivers.
The 80s was fun and I have many fond memories, but ultimately I stopped photography as a hobby when I started Bodybuilding. I started photography again once I was finished with Bodybuilding and purchased my first house, that was around 1990 and by 1995 I purchased my first digital 5 megapixel camera.
I have literally spent thousands of pounds on this hobby and have had many camera systems over the years, Olympus, Ricoh, Fuji, Nikon, Minolta, Sony, Canon and Panasonic.