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I have a great many old photographs, but there’s one I keep returning to, an old black and white shot from years ago, taken somewhere I couldn’t tell you the name of now if you asked. Nothing remarkable about the subject. Just light falling a particular way across an ordinary scene, the kind of thing you’d walk past without a second glance.

I’ve reworked that photograph more times than I could count, first in the darkroom, later in Photoshop, and more recently still with the newer tools. Each version looks different, but I keep coming back to the same original negative, as though there’s something in it I haven’t quite finished saying yet.

I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone but me. Perhaps every artist has one image like that, a sort of anchor they return to without quite meaning to. Mine happens to be a fairly unremarkable photograph of light on a wall. I’m rather fond of it, all the same, and I daresay I’ll be reworking it again before too long.

Before any of this, I spent a good many years in laboratories. Research work first, then teaching for a spell, and for a stretch that still makes people laugh when I mention it, quality assurance at a Guinness brewery. It’s not the sort of career you’d expect to lead anywhere near art, and for a long time it didn’t.

But I think it taught me something that turned out to matter a great deal: patience, and a willingness to get a process right before worrying about the result. In a laboratory, you don’t rush a reaction because you’re keen to see what happens. You measure, you wait, and you check your working. The darkroom asked exactly the same of me, years later, and so does the computer now, in its own way.

I don’t sit down expecting a picture to arrive fully formed. It takes tries, and failed tries, and a fair bit of patient fiddling before something feels right. I suppose that’s the thread running underneath all of it, laboratory bench, darkroom, and screen alike. Nobody tells you when you’re young that a career spent measuring things carefully might one day help you make a picture you’re proud of. I certainly didn’t see it coming.

I was born in the 1940s, and photography found me early. In those days there was no pressing a button and seeing the result on a little screen: you mixed your own chemicals, you worked in the dark, and you waited. I remember the smell of the darkroom more than almost anything else from those years: sharp, chemical, and somehow completely absorbing. You learned patience because the process demanded it, and you learned to really look at a photograph because you’d spent an hour coaxing it out of nothing.

For a long time, that was simply how photography worked, for me and for everyone. Then, gradually, the world changed around it. Cameras went digital, darkrooms became unnecessary, and eventually a computer could do in seconds what used to take an evening of careful work. I won’t pretend the change didn’t unsettle me a little at first. But once I’d retired and had the time to properly explore it, I found a version of the old darkroom magic waiting for me in Photoshop: the same instinct for balance and light and mood, just with different tools.

More recently still, as my health has made the old ways harder, I’ve leaned into AI to keep creating. It still surprises me, some mornings, that I can be making art at all after seventy-odd years of it changing shape around me. But the thread running through all of it (film, Photoshop, AI) has never really changed. It’s still about looking closely at the world and trying to make something honest out of what I see.

I don’t know how many more chapters there’ll be in this particular story, but I’m glad you’re here for this one. If you’d like to see where it’s led, have a browse of the shop: there’s a bit of all of it in there.