This year marks ten years since I started my business. I thought I’d take a trip down memory lane to where it started and logged into my old Flickr account for the first time in many, many years. It was all still there, like a time capsule. Adventures, mistakes, experiments, memories.

I was 21 years old and studying creative writing at university when the idea popped into my head all of a sudden. I’d always loved taking pictures, but this was different… I don’t know how to explain it other than to say that one day I woke up and knew that I wanted… needed to make photography my job, as soon as humanly possible. Truth be told I had precisely no idea of how to make that happen. I had no business or photography training, I just had a feeling.

Despite the fact that I didn’t even know what an f-stop was I spoke with my friends who were getting married later that year and I told them, I think I want to be a wedding photographer. They probably should have laughed in my face at the idea that I would shoot their wedding, but (to my everlasting gratitude) they agreed that I could be their photographer.

I’d somehow booked my first wedding… so then I had to figure out how on Earth I was going to do it.

So, I started shooting everything I could. If I saw something interesting, I took a picture. I shot friends, bands, family, strangers, shops, models, plants, animals… and a couple of weddings for free! I would lay in bed at night thinking of photos to take. I took some truly awful photos and tore my hair out trying to figure out what I could do better next time. Looking back, there are things that make me cringe for sure… but if you don’t start somewhere you never get to where you want to go.

As I scrolled back to those early days on my flickr account today I was overwhelmed… sure the pictures were often poorly composed, out of focus, over processed or worse: boring… but looking at them I can feel my excitement. I can remember how it felt. Every time I learned something new, or pestered my friend to pose for me, or got an idea and went out and made it happen… no matter how imperfect the result, I’m so proud that I took each and every one of these…