I have been a full time professional Leicester wedding photographer for over 25 years with more than 1,000 weddings photographed.
Established as one of the most experienced wedding photographers for Leicestershire wedding venues
I mainly photograph weddings around the Leicestershire area and so I have photographed wedding venues many times, up to 100 weddings at some. The chances are that I will of photographed a wedding at your venue and at the same time of year as your wedding and and so I can show you samples of your venue at that time of year.
Read my blog about the benefit of keeping it local
A Little About Me
This is the bit I tell you that I like coffee and cake. Now that’s out of the way let me tell you a little bit about me.
Firstly I don’t like to take myself too seriously. I like to experiment with facial hair and sometimes I might bleach my hair too !
And when I am not photographing or editing weddings I relax like this.
PHOTOGRAPHY
My early memories are of playing with an old camera without any film in it.
Here I am at 4 years old. I would spend my time around the garden for hours looking through the viewfinder and composing and then pressing the button “taking pictures” without any film loaded. Since then I have always felt that I knew what I wanted to do. And I’ve been doing it ever since !.
Leicester Wedding Photography.
I photographed my first wedding in Leicester when I was 20. It was film at that time and you had to get the wedding photography right the first time with no mistakes as there were no second chances or photoshop then. The camera I used only took 12 photos per roll of film before you had to change rolls which meant it was vital to think ahead and work fast which are still the key skills needed for wedding photography today.
A Pioneer of The Documentry Wedding Photography Style.
Proud to be able to describe myself one of the pioneers of the documentary, informal, relaxed style of wedding photography.
It was first Known as reportage wedding photography. At this time it was film with only 12 photos per roll which was slow to use. But along side this camera I also used a smaller faster 35mm camera for fast informal candid photography that no other wedding photographer in the area was doing at the time.
From the very start I invested in the very best camera you could buy at the time which was called a Hasselblad. These were the same cameras that Nasa used the moon missions which took the most famous photographs in the world. www.nasa.gov. The last one I brought before moving to digital was this fantastic red leatherette one here.
Here I am with it, leaning out of a Leicester wedding venue window.
As a trusted professional I am proud to of been asked to be the official photographer twice for events held in Leicester attended by HRH The Princess Royal.
My first job at 16 was working as a photo printer in one of the professional photo printing labs in Leicester and very soon I was promoted to manage the black and white printing department. My spare time was usually spent travelling and photographing landscapes with a vintage 5×4 inch plate camera that took one sheet of film at a time. Here I am with it in Dovedale age around 19.
At the pro photo lab I started with black and white and then trained as a colour photo printer and at the age of 19 I started working in the in-house photography department. A few years later I started photography by Bill Haddon in 1995.
Photo taken at the age of 20 and by then with 4 years darkroom experience and already manager of a lab’s black and white department and working in the photographic studio.
Today I still use all those printing skills learnt in a real darkroom, especially my time spent in the professional colour photo lab because to able see colour correctly takes years of experience. Today the darkroom is photoshop and a computer. You can see a few examples of photo editing here
Paris late 80s with a 5×4 inch plate camera
Here I am around 1990 in a field with an antique whole plate camera that takes sheets of almost A4 sized film one photo at a time.
