When I first started out in photography I had no clue the vast area it covers. I don’t mean in terms of genre but the different ways photographers fit into the space.

The camera club world is very pictorial. It is, I think, fundamentally fine art in style. The judges love a ‘pretty’ picture and those were the kinds of images I started out making.

However, as time progressed the vacuousness of a ‘pretty’ picture lost interest for me and I began making images which were fundamentally story-telling in nature & often conceptual. They do badly with the judges, who are often male and simply don’t get them. Those same images, however, have done really well in the wider photography world.

As I stated in this post, I’ve decided to enter a couple of images in an upcoming small exhibition in a local Gallery and had to decide which of my pictures to choose. I realised that my conceptual and story-telling photos are not something that most people would choose to hang on their wall, so I set about making a more ‘pretty’ picture which I thought was saleable.

I think it’s going to be possible for me to combine these two aspects of photography – the pretty pictorial images to sell and the deeper story-telling ones, often very personal to my own life story, which are not commercial but ultimately more gratifying to produce. Time will tell!