As a kid I was the wierd one who wasn’t popular or cool, yet somehow I still seemed to make friends. And they weren’t wierd people – they were (and still are) perfectly normal. So I’m grateful that they chose to befriend me! I say wierd because I was one of those annoying sorts who seemed to find interests in things outside the mainstream, and then tell everyone how much I liked them in order to appear interesting and ‘different’ (in a good way). Of course, this trick is far from original and has been adopted by every attention hungry teenager.
So why am I telling you this? Well, it is by way of introduction to this blog. You see, when I was about 6 or 7, my parents went on holiday with some of their friends and went to the Natural History Museum in London, while me and my younger sister got packed off to our Grandparents for another glorious week being spoiled rotten and taken to country houses to see how the other half used to live.
When my parents returned to pick me and my sister up, they showed me the brochure from the museum, as well as their photos, and I became obsessed with getting a camera so that I could take pictures of my own. I even went so far as to make a pretend camera out of the box that toothpaste comes in. It was quite impressive really, had it’s own pop up button any everything. the only problem was that it didn’t pop back up once you’d pressed it – it kind of fell inside the box. After harassing my parent’s continually, they eventually bought me a cheap small compact 120mm film camera. It didn’t take the highest quality pictures. It was on a par with a cheap disposable camera, to be honest – but the film was really easy to load, and it was almost unbreakable. I couldn’t be stopped – every school trip, every outing to the local petting farm with the Brownies, every time the dog sneezed, I was there snapping away, anxiously awaiting the results when the film came back from the chemist (with the inevitable ‘quality control’ oval stickers all over the prints indicating over/under exposure, or that I had been too close to the subject).
But that’s not the weird part. Every kid who grew up in the 80′s had some manner of cheap camera (remember the ones that used to have the pop-up viewfinder? They were tiny!). No, the part that perhaps demonstrates the slight oddness is what really drove my passion for pics in my early teens.
I was (and still am) quite a Pink Floyd fan. Which for a teenage girl of 13 years old, isn’t totally unheard of, but isn’t the norm. It was around the time that they had released ‘The Division Bell’, and anyone who has this album will probably also be quite in awe of some of the stunning photographs in the album sleeve (is it still called that these days?). The album cover has two giant metallic heads remeniscent of the Easter Island heads, facing each other in the english countryside. I later found out this was the work of Storm Thorgerson (doesn’t he have a cool name?) and that he’d done the artwork for pretty much all the Pink Floyd albums.
The inside artwork also consisted of landscape shots, with a solitary figure walking along the horizon with an enormous piece of material blowing in a vertical curve behind him. Well this was just incredible to me. I still have no idea how the shot was done (probably wires?) but it’s one of the most inspiring pictures I’ve seen.
Which brings me to the point (finally, you cry!). On seeing these pictures I remembered that my dad had an old Zenith SLR camera. I can’t even remember the model now, but it was bigger and more fancy looking than my 35mm compact at the time (I had upgraded from the 12omm). I was most impressed with the way you could select what you wanted to focus on (later realising the proper name for it, depth of field). So dad showed me how to use it, and how to understand the numbers on the lense and why they were important, and off I went, loading more and more film into this camera to take slightly more arty shots of the dog, or my friends, or random sunsets.
When next I visited my Grandparents, I took this camera along. My grandad, it turns out, had his own SLR, a Pentax, and better still, he had different lenses. This opened up a load more opportunity. Soon enough I began my GCSEs, and as part of my Art GCSE I used the camera more and more, learning darkroom techniques and developing my own prints. Seeing the pictures I had taken materialise right before me spurred me on to take more and more. My Aunty Pat had also given me an SLR to use by this stage, an OM-20 with a fixed 50mm lense. At this time, for a saturday job, I was working in a camera shop processing other peoples photographs and taking appointments for the owner’s studio. I managed to get quite a discount on things like filters and printing 
For some reason, towards the end of my A Levels, and at University, I didn’t use the camera as much. Possibly because I filled my time with all that hard study (!) and hard socialising, and was more interested in going to gigs. I did drag my friends out for occasional hikes in the Lake District and Forest of Bowland, taking random landscape shots. But most of my photographic portfolio from those years consists of group photos on nights out, or fancy dress parties. Good times, good times.
When I took the almost obligatory year out after Uni, around Oz and New Zealand I took my Pentax 35mm compact camera. This camera was quite the upgrade from my usual sort. And I still have the same type today (alas, not the same camera though – that was stolen while in Oz, along with my pictures from Australia Day, which really p*****d me off!). I’d also picked up a medium sized tripod in Singapore for about £13.
It wasn’t until I moved to Ireland and made friends with a bloke who was really into his photography that I picked up the OM20 again. I ordered some lenses from eBay, and rediscovered depth of field again! I also ordered myself another 35mm SLR – a Canon EOS3000.
I’ve only been digital for 2 years, and shelved the EOS temporarily in March (I’ll come back to it – you have to be disciplined with film. I’ve been slowly building up my equipment, and am currently waiting for a studio lighting kit to arrive (more on that later).
[...] My Life in Pictures… [...]