I don’t know if this is an interesting question, or indeed an interesting answer. But, I’m going to try and answer it anyway! This one is quite a long piece, so grab yourself a brew and settle in.

I’ve always been “artsy”. Just not in the visual arts disciplines. I started to learn to play the piano as a child, didn’t like practicing and gave up. This was when I was about 7 years old. Aged 9 I took up playing brass instruments, and it was becoming clear to everyone, including myself, that I couldn’t draw. Aged 14 I started to play the Trombone and it became apparent to me that this is what I wanted to do. I loved it. It was also clearer than ever that I couldn’t draw. Or paint. Or make things out of clay. Much to the frustration of my poor art teachers. Try as I might, I simply wasn’t able to do it and I didn’t ‘get’ visual art in the way that I did Music. 

I left school, had a gap year doing music stuff, went to uni, got a music degree and then trained as teacher. I decided after qualifying that this wasn’t for me at this point in my life, so I went on to enjoy a moderately successful career in something that was about as far away from teaching and music as it could be. A strange choice for someone who had sent the last 20 odd years practicing and devoting so much time to musical pursuits. I loved music (I still do now, but much more as a consumer than a creator), but if I couldn’t make money performing then I wasn’t interested. 

I stuck at this career, which I enjoyed for around 8 years and then when I stopped enjoying it, I left and went back to teaching. I know I’m not painting a strong picture of sticking with anything at the moment, but stay with me…

I took myself out in Central London on my next free evening (I remember specifically being on Golden Jubilee Bridges) and took, quite possibly, hundreds of images. I couldn’t wait to get home and edit them. 

I got home, got the raw files out of the camera, opened them up in my shiny new Lightroom subscription and they were AWFUL. They were full of motion blur, abysmally out of focus, under exposed, over exposed and there wasn’t a single usable image. 

I couldn’t use the camera. I was gutted and I was worried that I had just poured a load of money down the drain. 

I got much better, found other sources of inspiration such as Liam Wong, Joel Meyorwitz and Saul Leiter. I became obsessed with shallow depths of field, spurred on by my bargain second hand Canon 50mm F/1.8 prime lens . The world, or at least my little corner of it, was my oyster. 

I was out most evenings and into the night, sometimes getting up at stupid hours of the morning to get the night tube into town when I knew it would be quieter. I was hooked. The moment I took my first long exposure light trails really cemented this for me.

This led to me teaching photography at GCSE and A-Level, which I LOVED. On selfish note, it helped me to develop my own skills and learn about new photographers and techniques. On a selfless note, it led to me sharing my love of this medium with a host of young people and giving them their first creative outlet. It also showed me that you need don’t need expensive gear to take incredible photos, I saw a very high standard of work from some of these students. 

I carried on, I got better and I then found new areas to improve. Worked on these and then found the next thing. It never ends.

Photography is a constant cycle of self improvement, which in a way is something that is very true of music, alongside all of the other creative disciplines. We never get it perfect, but we can get a little better each time we do something, and I like that. I like that a lot. 

I’d always wanted something that I was good at (and enjoyed!) which was within one of the visual arts disciplines, and this has ticked that box for me. I know this sounds a bit like I am blowing my own trumpet, and that ‘good’ is subjective, but to have someone compliment the work I have done is something that I really value.

I also value the feedback and any criticism that comes along with it, but producing something that people like and want to say positive things about and that is visual is something that was alien to me and I am still getting used to. I don’t remember a single positive from my Art teachers at school, largely because I didn’t produce work that was any good, but I often wonder what would have happened if I had access to photography at school at that age!