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 am the expert for Leicestershire wedding venues and have photographed up to 85 weddings at some of them. This is because I mainly keep to the Leicestershire area and so I get to work at the wedding venues many times. The chances are that I will of worked at your venue at the same time of year as your wedding and can show you samples of how it would look.
Read my blog about the benefit of keeping it local
A Little About Me
Ok so this is the bit I am supposed to tell you that I like coffee and cake. Instead of all of that I want to tell you about my life behind the camera. But here is a little about me personally first.
I don’t like to take myself too seriously. Like to experiment with facial hair and don’t be surprised if I turn up with bleached hair too !
And when I am not shooting or editing weddings I relax like this.
PHOTOGRAPHY
My early memories are of playing with an old camera without any film in it.
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, no delete button 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.
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 cameras that Nasa used on all the moon missions and took the most famous photographs in the world. www.nasa.gov. The last one I brought before moving to digital was a fantastic red leatherette one.
Here I am with it, leaning out of a Leicester wedding venue window.
Along with wedding photography 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 pro labs in Leicester and very soon I was promoted to manage the black and white printing department. My spare time would be spent travelling and shooting landscapes with a 5×4 inch plate camera that took one shot shot at a time. Here I am with it in in Dovedale 1987
At the pro 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 which would see me on many outdoor photographic assignments. A few years later I started photography by Bill Haddon in 1995.
Photo taken in 1988 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 (wet) darkroom, especially my time spent in the pro colour lab because to able “see” colour correctly takes years of experience. Today the darkroom is photoshop and a computer. See here for a few samples
Paris late 80s with a 5×4 inch plate camera
Another one- this time in the 1990s with an antique whole plate camera that takes sheets of almost A4 sized film one shot at a time.
