Asides from being a filmmaker, I also dabble in the world of photography and digital retouching. I love messing around with photoshop. When I left school I decided to do some night classes in creative subjects like video production and photography. This was a great way to learn the photgraphic processes. Students were given access to the dark rooms and I started producing a lot of images just to get practice. After I had learned the black and white printing techniques,I moved onto the colour process and learned that as well. This was about 1997 and digital cameras had still not gone widespread.
When I finally left I had all this knowledge of photography, developing and printing. Then suddenly everything went digital and I was more or less back to square one. I left university in 2002 and couldn't really get a job in the movie business. Most of the positions were for work experience, but by this stage I was looking for full time work with a salary. I did move down to London and went for a few interviews but the salay for a runner job was £8000 a year. There was no possible way to afford to live and work fulltime doing that. Besides that, the work really was shit and some of the people in the industry were living much too far up their own arses. I figured if you are working for idiots and getting paid lower than minimum wage money, then what was the up side. In short, there wasn't one. I did have one good job when I went to London working with really nice folk, but it was only working on a short film in Ealing and obviously was over when the shoot finished. The film was called 'Short' starring Samantha Janus and Rupert Proctor and can be viewed at the following link.
That's when the call came from a friend of mine asking me if I would like to come and work at a photography studio that was opening in Swindon. I asked him what I would be doing and he told me that I would be a digital retoucher. I told him I had no idea what that was of how to do it and he said that he would teach me. I moved to Swindon on the Friday, learned as much as I could about photoshop on Saturday and Sunday and started work on the Monday. I learned the basics of the process used by the company and the rest I picked up as I went along. To cut a long story short, I worked there for a year and then moved to London and worked for the same company at a different studio. This got me through the next few years and now besides my job in the media industry, I work freelance when anyone comes to me with an interesting project or a digital retouching emergency.
I've decided to start this blog to run along side the film business blog to show you lovely people some of my images and describe a little about where the ideas came from, what they were for and how they came about. I hope that you will be able to draw some creative inspiration from my work and pick up your cameras, or slide up to your computers and create some gasp-inducingly good images of your own. As always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free.
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