In 1989, a fresh faced young business graduate was let loose on the photographic shops, wholesalers, labs, and assorted other accounts in the southeast corner of the UK as the new Area Sales Representative for Kodak Limited, the UK subsidiary of the American giant. Although it was in my blood, as will shortly be explained, this was the official start of a journey in photography that continues to this day.
My mother and father both worked for Kodak at their head office in Hemel Hempstead, and before that at company’s main production site at Harrow. And to cement the relationship with the American photographic brand, my maternal grandfather also worked for a while in the lab at Harrow*. My father spent his whole career working for Kodak, retiring after 50 years service.
The story of Kodak, and how the corporation imploded in 2012, will be in a future post, but when I headed to Kent in my E plate Vauxhall Cavalier (a typical rep car), the brand was still king on the high street. I sold film and cameras to traditional photographic shops, which, at the time, were still found in most towns, and paper and chemicals to mini-labs and larger commercial laboratories. I sold mini-lab equipment, finance plans, and a complete turn-key branding concept (Kodak Express). I looked after the South London wholesalers which sold into the chemist and CTN (Confectioner, Tobacconist, Newsagent) sectors, as well as various leisure outlets, including seaside kiosks.
As part of my training, we went out and shot film (there were no digital cameras back then), developed it in the darkroom, and did our own printing, although I can’t remember much about it! When I was out on the road, I swapped a load of film for a manual Pentax 35mm SLR with a view to learning the basics of photography, but I never really got into it, preferring the convenience of the 35mm compact cameras that I was selling. I must have sold the Pentax, but I still have a lot of my sample cameras on the shelves in my office, or languishing in a box somewhere in the loft.
I didn’t take to being a rep (bear in mind it was pre-mobile phones, pre-laptops - I had to book appointments from public telephone boxes, and put hard copies of my orders in the post each evening), and I decided to pursue a career in marketing, leaving Kodak in 1992.
Of course, I carried on taking pictures: on the aforementioned compact cameras, then a dalliance with a Canon APS camera (Advanced Photo System), before buying one of the early Digital SLR cameras, a Canon 300D, just before my son was born in 2001. This was upgraded to a 700D, paired with a very nice Sigma 18-200mm lens, which was ideal for the sort of photography that I was doing.
For the next 23 years, I was a fairly prolific digital user, especially when I started going to airshows, where 1,000+ shots was not uncommon in a day’s session - for a while I also lugged around a Sigma 150-600mm lens, a beast, but good for aircraft. Apart from airshows, photography was mostly capturing the kids, and holidays - nothing particularly creative, and as time went on, the mobile phone came along, and as the quality improved, it gradually usurped the cumbersome DSLR, which languished in the bag for most of the year. Despite having some good kit, I never really worked out all the aperture and shutter speed nonsense, relying on the software in the camera to compensate for my laziness. I certainly did not muck around with Lightroom or Photoshop - that was something the creative types at the design and advertising agencies I used excelled at and I left it to them!
In 2013, I gave up practicing the dark arts of marketing for health reasons, and the following year we moved down to Cornwall, where there were coastal and nautical adventures to photograph, occasionally with the 700D, but mostly with my iPhone. I began researching the Cold War and started writing, eventually having six books published on various Cold War related subjects, as can be seen on this website.
In 2023/2024, however, several different aspects of my life intertwined to prompt the next chapter in my photographic journey … see part 2 of My Photographic Odyssey
* My grandfather also worked as a dental technician making false teeth! Our family claim to fame is that he made a set of teeth for Sir John Mills, the actor who starred in classic war films like Above us the waves, Ice Cold In Alex, and the Colditz Story.
** The Kodak S1100XL was a re-badged Chinon 3001, and despite being a very capable camera, didn’t sell well. At one point, more S1100s were being stolen from the warehouse by unscrupulous staff than were being sold! They found a load of empty boxes stuffed down behind some racking …
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