So this is my first blog post. I hope you bear with me as I
throw out some musings and observations – it’s mostly going to be photography based,
but I’m an unpredictable sort so it’s difficult to tell.

All I can say is that it won’t boring. But that might be a
lie too. Hell, it’s subjective, and that’s close enough to be plausible deniability.

So the topic today is… what brought me here.

Prior to working with cameras, I was a lawyer of sorts. If you
want the specifics, I was a legal advisor specialising in the areas of intellectual
property, contract, and a few others. Not the typical backstory for someone who
now spends their life making people and things look (usually pretty). So why am
I here?

Well, the world of law, especially when you work for a very
small company (as I did) is a bit unusual. Every win or loss is critical, and
all you do – day in, day out, over the course of years and years – is deal with
conflict. Pre-empt this conflict, prepare for that conflict and deal with the fallout
afterwards – and that’s not to mention the actual conflicts themselves… and
there’s no such thing as leaving it at the office. It followed me around. Weekends,
evenings, “holidays”, birthdays, anniversaries – you name it, part of me was in
the office in the middle of a conflict. When things went well, the people that you dealt with hated you, and when things went badly, the people you worked with hated you. You spend your days scrapping. An sometimes quite eloquent, dramatic scrap, but the reality was much more 1 am precedent hunts than it was Hollywood courtroom drama. Case in point, never have  I told someone that they can’t handle the truth. 

Then, one day, you realise that the person you were, that was okay with
spending their days doing this, no longer exists. Now, I’d like to say that my
career change has signalled the end of conflict, but I think we all know that’d
be a bit optimistic. There is less of it though.

The other element is, if you’ve been through formal legal
education, you’re very used to finding things out for yourself. In that profession,
you do an awful lot of studying throughout your career. I’m a self-taught photographer
/ videographer / editor / whatever else it is… So finding things out for myself
comes naturally. Whether it was learning about the exposure triangle at the beginning
of my career to finding out about cyanotype toning techniques and split grade
printing, having a knack for finding things  out has been helpful.

The version I usually tell people is that I came to
photography the way one comes to prostitution; first I did it for myself, then I
did it for my friends… eventually, I came to do it for money.