Picture perfect

In the coming weeks I will be sharing some of the secrets of construction photography and offering hints and tips on turning a muddy building site into a photographic masterpiece.

Since winning a school competition when I was eight with my Kodak Instamatic photography has been has a major part of my life. I was photography mad when I was young and my first break came when I spent a day with the Daily Mirror shooting an Arsenal vs Manchester Utd game at Highbury - naturally I thought sports photography would be my future.

It wasn’t to be. Instead at the age of 17 I started my career at the Building Research Establishment as an assistant photographer. I was occasionally distracted by other work– in my early days I worked part-time shooting parties for Playboy – but I stayed on the straight and narrow at the BRE and eventually became head of photography.

Today photography has changed radically through the introduction of digital cameras. I still use my large and medium format cameras with film but 95% of the time my work is shot digitally. The quality of digital cameras now is very high and as a result we professionals have to compete with snappers using the office digital camera.

It’s not all doom and gloom as there are clients who still appreciate the need to commission good quality professional photography and thankfully will pay the correct rate. Working as a freelance for the last nine years, I have worked on a wealth of construction projects and hopefully I can offer some useful insight into my work over the coming weeks.