When I was young boy I was always outdoors, kicked out and told to be back in time for tea at 17:00, my mate and I would roam all over Folkestone in the UK and build camps, search for fossils and walk for miles.
I always had a love of Nature but in the environment I was bought up in you were deemed soft if you were into Nature and bird watching and so on.
My Grandfather, a quiet and gentle man who had flown aircraft in WW2 was one of the few constant male figures in my life and instilled a love and wonderment of nature in me, but because of the situation around me I was loath to follow my dreams and study this, and along with a turbulent school life it wasn’t really until I was 14 and got moved to a decent school that had a farm on it that I rekindled my interest in Nature, biology and farm life, and by then the teachers had no time for me because I was for all intents and purposes a dunce, so I was sent out to clean out the pigs instead of looking through a microscope.
Art became my rescuer and along with the help of a couple of teachers who saw beyond the lout I managed to scrape my way into Art college.
My first foray into Wildlife photography was while at college. I owned a basic manual Pentax SLR and I somehow managed to get my hands on a 500 mm mirror lens. Convinced I was going to be the next Simon King, a childhood hero of mine, I set off to sit in the bushes and try to capture some images of the local Rabbit population. I was gutted when out of the roll of 36 black and white negatives 32 were black and 4 had grey shaky images that may have been of rabbits but equally may have been the Loch Ness monster, needless to say I didn’t really bother after that, travelling the World for work and taking photos of people and landscapes instead that is until a few years ago.
Now as I rapidly approach 60 years old, I don’t really care if someone thinks of me as “being soft”. Thanks to hard work I now own a small slice of Farmland and I have had the privilege to assist my own sheep in the birth of their lambs, weaned and raised both lambs, chickens, ducks, quail, rabbits, puppies and calves!
And thus begins the journey I sometimes wish I had started 50 years ago….. I look forward to having you follow me along as I Photograph, Film and chat about wildlife and test out a few bits of kit along the way if I can get my grubby mitts on them.
Thanks for following along