"The Reader" Artwork - Limited Edition of 25

I bought my first camera when I was 16 and set up a darkroom in my bedroom.
After working for 20 years as a Carpenter and Builder, I was forced to look for another trade, mainly due to Arthritis and helped along with the 1990 recession.

I decided to take up my photography hobby as a new career and completed a City & Guilds course locally in Norwich and decided After talking of a friend of mine, Tom Mackie, that rather than go down the high street studio/family portraits route I wanted to run my own Stock Image Library too and started shooting all sorts of images, mainly to license images to the greetings card & calendars markets.

It took seven long years to get established to the point that companies started to approach me looking for pictures, This was the start of something good and the biggest boost for the business was when I decided to go against the advice of other photographs I knew who told me to stay away from animals & kids, I reasoned that if most photographers stayed clear of this market then that was for me...
Over the next 25 years I became a specialist at 'Shooting' all types of animals, mainly domestic (5-7 week old pets) ) I would travel to peoples house, farms etc, set up my mini studio and create authentic garden sets, Christmas sets, and other sets for all the occasions that card companies love. Over half of the 45,000 images in my stock Library are of animals and many are still licensed out today.
Unfortunately, Arthritis and age means that my knees can't stand the strain of kneeling down to the animals level and hope to get up again, and so five years ago I decided to stop photographing animals and change my style completely, moving over into the World of Art.

Now I Shoot my favorite things: landscapes, seascapes, trees, old barns and buildings etc. But once again, stay away from all the 'pretty' images that anyone and every one seems to shoot and started creating 'Artworks' by blending various textures and special effects, making each image totally unique and unrepeatable, with a limited edition of only 25 prints before the image is destroyed for good! After shooting pretty and cute for so many years It is great fun to create darker moody and sometimes downright spooky images......