I have been fascinated by images, taking photographs and making films all my life. It started when I was four years old, I spent a lot of time tearing photos out if my mothers glossy magazines. Not long after she noticed this, she and my father bought me a tiny snap camera from Woolworth, it cost 2 shillings and sixpence and took pictures on 127 roll film; no focusing, no exposure control, genuine ‘point and shoot’.  I can remember taking pictures of everything,  and every few weeks they paid to have the rolls developed and printed, I really wish I still had some of those pictures, seeing the world from a few feet of the ground would have been interesting.

Mr. Jefferies, my high school art teacher, encouraged me to take photography seriously, and I did. I was born and brought up in Torbay, a seaside area in the South West of England. The area was renowned for dairy farming and fishing, and was a popular summer holiday location. There was plenty of things to take pictures of, the fishing industry in nearby Brixham, the small commercial port of Teignmouth and the regional livestock market in Newton Abbot to name but a few. I was also interested in filmmaking, and armed with either an Ilford Sportsman 35mm camera, or my Russian standard 8mm film camera I became a fledgling documentary photographer and filmmaker.

Through an extraordinary coincidence I got an early break as a pofessional filmmaker, while I was still studying. I was a member of the Torbay Amateur Cine Society and had been asked to help shoot some footage of the passing out  On the way home I got as far as the town of Paignton and discovered I had lost the bus fair to take me from here to Torquay, my home. About 4 miles away. To relieve the boredom of walking the main road, I took the back roads. Here I bumped into my old High School Biology teacher Leslie Jackman; it turned out that Leslie (and another teacher Ron Peggs) worked with Peter Scott, (the naturalist and son of Scott of the Antarctic) making Natural History Films for what was to become the BBC’s Natural History Film Unit in Bristol. Leslie owned and ran Paignton Aquarium, based in a building on Paignton Harbour, where they had a set off staging tanks, containing all sorts of river bank models. I became an assistant cameraman for them, during school holidays, shooting film for an episode of the Natural History series ‘Look’, my first paid job (and one that about ten years later helped me get a job in the BBC.)  Over slack filming times, Leslie got me taking still pictures for his extensive library of images of the area. During my time with Leslie and Ron, it became obvious to me that all I wanted to do was shoot documentary pictures and films and this would be helped by gaining some formal training at Art School.

In the late 60’s there were very few Art Schools specializing in photography and film, luckily one of the best known was in Plymouth, about 30 miles from my home. However, I had specialized in the sciences at high school, hardly the best way to get accepted at Art School! They told me I could apply with a portfolio, so I had to prepare one. I had just shot a series of stills back stage during the production put on by the Torbay Amateur Operatic Society, I really liked the pictures but the small 4 x 6 prints made by the local pharmacy shop didn’t really seem good enough to constitute a portfolio; they needed to be made bigger. However, I had no access to a regular darkroom and no real training in printing. It so happened that my fathers office were dumping an old photocopier, and I mean photo! It was made up of a light-box with a heavy lid and a roller fed processing bath. To make a copy a sheet of yellow negative paper was exposed in the light-box, in contact with the original being copied. The negative paper was fed into the rollers in conjunction with a sheet of print receiving paper. Both were coated with a processing chemical and squeezed together, 60 seconds later the two were peeled apart and there was a copy.

So this dumped copier was shipped over to our garage. The negative paper was really insensitive, so a darkened garage was all that was needed to handle it without it getting exposed. I set up a 35mm slide projector, mounted the negatives from the Opera shoot in cardboard 35mm slide mounts and projected my negatives onto the photocopy paper. It took at least 10 minutes of exposure, but then the trip through the rubber rollers and tanks of chemical, with the receiving paper, and there was an enlarged print – a very high contrast one! Next came presentation – the prints were on very thin paper, they needed to be mounted on something. The only thing I had were 4 x 8 feet of hardboard, thin wooden sheets about ¼ inch thick. A bucket of wall paper paste later, the prints were mounted on the sheets and with judicious use of a jigg saw, I had a set of mounted prints.

The trip on the train was tough, my new ‘portfolio’ was very very heavy. Any way, Ivor Innis, the principal was impressed enough to give me a place on the course. From then on my love of making pictures was honed by Dick Hill and Tony Mears, two teachers that I will eternally be grateful to.