I started life a a keen amateur photographer.

There was no digital in those days, it was film. Remember film? Aged about 15 I would shoot on 400ISO black and white film and wait for my prints to come back about a week later to the chemist where I lived in New Zealand. The expectation was palpable and I wouldn’t sleep the night before. The prints were generally 6”x4” and if I had enough pocket money I could stretch to 7”x5”. My little hobby was all consuming and as I got older I learned to develop my films and make my own prints. There was a darkroom at school.

Back then it was too expensive to develop and print colour film so I concentrated on black and white. I loved the way a black and white print could completely change as you left it in the developer fluid. Stopping the process at the cruitial time or ‘fixing’ it as it’s called in darkroom speak was make or break. It was also costly as it would require many attempts to get the perfect print.

Then I won a photography competition.

I submitted a set of three black and white prints to Amateur Photographer magazine. The images were of busy commuters in Waterloo station in central London. I still have them in cheap Ikea frames sitting somewhere in my garage.

All my work was on black and white film and I was continuing to print my work myself.

The thing about black and white images when you make lots of prints yourself is that sets start emerging. Two or three images may work together, the grey tones are similar or the clouds looks the same, or the white sparkly reflection on the water matches. Four black and white prints can be of completely different subject matter but they can match and hang together. This doesn’t happen so much with colour prints.

I first noticed this when I was collecting my prints from the chemist and I still look for sets today when I’m standing by my camera on my tripod on that freezing bridge at sunrise.

I’m always looking for that one stand out image and my black and white 15 year old brain is also looking for sets.