At the ripe old age of 13 I was photographing news events for two provincial (in Canada) papers. Also weddings, 50th wedding anniversaries, christenings, parties. I quickly dropped the weddings as they were far too much effort for too little return, but the rest of my "imagery" work led me to a 20-year career as a newspaper journalist, a PR writer for national television, a roving reporter, and eventually a media marketer, one of the early ones in Sydney (Australia) before that career area took off like a gunshot and everybody got into it.
After my move to Australia in the mid-'70s photography became secondary to my writing and other related work. I gave myself long holiday breaks between media contracts, usually to Southeast Asia where I photographed like mad, travel, landscapes, general images for stock sales. The going was good for 'stock' in those days. I did two trips to Bali (1972 and 1974) and shot mostly Kodachrome but also a lot of B&W. Back then photographs of Bali could easily be sold and my B&W sales actually outpaced the color work for a few years. A German magazine did a two-page spread of a sunrise shot I had taken on Tri-X, with a color tint, and then insisted on paying me the (lower) B&W fee for it. I complained and wrote letters and eventually got paid the color fee which was 50% higher. Those were the good old days.
The going was good while it lasted but like almost everything in one's life, it had to end. Which it did for me, in the mid-1980s. I changed directions twice, the first time to the Australian civil service and then to a new career as an interior design architect.
By the '90s I was still doing stock but more so for my own leisure and pleasure. My 'styles' changed drastically and I gradually evolved a more personal approach. Fewer Velveeta landscapes and travel-magazine oriented scenes to more direct imagery, people, places, close-ups. Much more satisfying, and to my surprise these new images went on selling. I also did architectural photography, notably of old colonial buildings in Asian countries.
My stock work kept me busy til the mid-'00s when digital photography became more,"commonplace" (popular) and amateur shooters began flooding the market with what I derided as "digicrap" but a lot of it was (and still is) superlatively good, they were selling it as cheap as chips or even giving it away, and as the years passed my sales went down. 2016 was my last good year for stock. I still make a few sales but now in my 70s my interests are elsewhere and I no longer submit as much to agencies as I did twenty years ago, that and younger photographers have stepped in to fill my shoes and are keeping the (very few) sales markets still buying at sensible prices, well supplied with quality images. My time as a photographer has mostly passed. In some ways I miss it, in other ways I don't.
My most satisfying photography has been of my family in Canada and my life in Australia. In the former, I was the only family member with pro quality gear (a Yashica D TLR and a Metz electronic flash) and I did a lot of weekend photography of my grandparents, who were cow and pig farmers and producers of maple syrup in eastern Canada. The color slides I took of my grandma in her flower garden or tending the hooks (chickens), and of my grandpa and my cousins making maple candy are the only images we have of them at that time (early to mid-'60s). Sadly, all of them are gone now. I'm one of very few survivors of my generation of cousins, nephews and nieces. Which of course makes those old images of mine all the more precious to my younger relations.
Nowadays I do mostly postcard travel images when I'm out and about in Asia, and of our cats at home or on bush landscapes during our walks in rural Australia. Not as exciting as when I was younger, but it still satisfies, and it keeps me out and about.
To be honest, I still haven't fully worked out why I take pictures. I doubt I ever will. But I hope to have a good longer time to do all my pondering.
