About

I take photographs and design web sites.

I have always been interested in photography, I bought my first camera when I was 8 years old. It was from Woolworths, had a metal body, glass lens and I mean a glass lens and a square metal rectangular pop up view finder. It used 120 roll film and cost me 2s/6d.

My Dad used to get his black and white films from Gratispool, a mail order firm in Glasgow, who would develop the film and return the prints with a free film.

I used to buy celluloid black and white 120 film rolls from Woolworths, my Dad used to develop the negatives using the cupboard under the stairs as his dark room where he would take the film out of the roll and put it in the processing tank.

Once in the tank it was out from under the stairs and into the kitchen to process the film. For me the fun started when the film had been processed. The kitchen became a dark room with a red light bulb in the ceiling holder the developing trays were on the kitchen cupboards and the sink was filled with cold water.

The roll of film was cut into individual negatives and a negative was placed in a glass holder pressing against print paper the same size as the negative.

The light bulb would be changed to an ordinary tungsten bulb and I would expose the print by holding it close to the light bulb and counting the seconds, then it was into the Developer, Stop Bath and Fixer. Finally there it was, a little contact print, I still have some of the negatives and prints.

I now use a Canon 7D and process my photos using Photoshop, there’s a world of difference.

I went over to digital photography when camera sensors delivered about 3 million pixels. I needed to process these digital images using computer software. The software I used, claimed it could be used to produce web sites, so in about 1999 I decided to have a go at designing a web site.

Even though the internet was a busy place by then, things were still quite crude and I quickly discovered that the technology was so new that there weren’t courses I could go on to learn web site design.

So I went to the library and borrowed a book, it was called something like “How to design your first web site” and from there, I just carried on.

I still like photography.