People ask me fairly often how I ended up doing what I do, and I never really know where to start with that one. The short version is that nothing was planned. I was in bands for years, toured the UK and Europe and bits of North America, designed MySpace layouts for money (which tells you how long ago this started), ran alternative club nights in something like 17 cities, had a go at running a marketing agency, worked at Tesco during lockdown because rent doesn’t care about your career trajectory, and somehow ended up as a commercial photographer. It sounds like I’m making half of it up when I list it out like that, but every single one of those things fed into the next, and I think they’ve all made me better at what I do now.
Gig Posters and Bad Decisions
I was about 17 when the creative stuff really kicked off. I was in college, messing about in Photoshop, nothing serious at all. I’d joined a small local band around the same time, and the gig posters people were making for us were just… not good, genuinely bad. So I figured I’d have a crack at making some myself. Looking back, I was almost certainly pissing off the people who’d been doing posters for the local scene already, but I was 17 and I didn’t really think about that. I just wanted things to look decent.
That’s where it started, though. Paid gig poster work led to doing MySpace layouts for bands and a few brands, and it just kept ticking along. The money was never huge, but it meant I had something coming in while I was off on tour.
Touring and Dropping Out
I did start university in 2005, studying music technology. I lasted a couple of years before I dropped out. My thinking at the time was that I’d learn more playing hundreds of gigs a year than sitting in a lecture hall, and honestly, I still think I was right about that. I did pick up sound engineering through college and the start of my degree though, and that’s another one of those skills that I didn’t realise at the time would keep being useful down the line.
From about 2007 to 2012 I was in bands called Kids Can’t Fly, Fandangle, and New Riot, and we were touring constantly. Up and down the UK, across Europe, and then with New Riot we landed a support slot with a huge band down the East Coast of the US and Canada, playing rooms that held 3,000+ people. We lost an absolute shit ton of money doing that tour, but it was so worth it. I don’t think any university course could have taught me what those years did (how to adapt on the fly, how to deal with things going wrong every other night, how much you can actually get done when you’re fully locked in on something).
I’ll be honest though, I was still a bit of an awkward person back then, and I rubbed people up the wrong way fairly often. I hadn’t learned the emotional and social intelligence that I have these days (more on that another time). But throughout all of the touring, I was still designing on the side, and that was my actual income, because playing in bands at that level definitely doesn’t pay personal bills.
The Design Years
The band thing wound down around 2014. People were settling into proper jobs, starting families, doing the normal stuff. That chapter just sort of closed on its own. Luckily I’d already been working as a graphic designer at Solent Students’ Union since 2011 (stayed there until 2015), so it wasn’t like the floor fell out from under me.
My wall at the Students' Union. Every poster on there was one of mine.
That job was genuinely brilliant for my development, and probably the most varied design role I could have stumbled into. One day I’d be designing some wild poster for a Drink the Bar Dry night (exactly as chaotic as it sounds), and the next I’d be laying out an annual report for the charity’s trustees. Completely different ends of the spectrum, sometimes in the same week. I got really comfortable with InDesign, sharpened up my Illustrator work, and picked up more web stuff too. But the biggest thing was just how many different styles of design I had to figure out. You can’t really buy that kind of range.
The other thing that happened while I was there (and I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time) was that I ended up covering marketing tasks that weren’t technically my job. Positions like marketing coordinator were vacant more often than they were filled, and I just… did it, and I sort of became a marketer without really noticing.
Club Nights and a Marketing Agency
In my last year at the Students’ Union, I started running alternative club nights. Anything with guitars in, basically (emo, pop-punk, alternative, all of that). It started in one venue in Southampton and expanded to another city within the year, and then just kept snowballing.
That’s when I left my job. I went out on my own to run the events, but alongside that I also started a small marketing agency with a friend, handling social media, design, and photography for a few local businesses (two restaurants and a tattoo shop, if I remember right). It was my first time having actual retainer clients and being responsible for the whole range of someone else’s marketing. Meetings, back-and-forth emails, keeping people happy, all of it. I won’t pretend I was a natural at the client relationship side of things straight away, but I got better at it quickly because I had to.
Eventually, though, we stopped the agency. We asked ourselves why we were spending all this time helping other people make money when we could be putting that energy into the clubbing brand, which was taking off. We put everything into it, and over the years it ran (from about 2014 to 2020), we expanded to 16 or 17 locations across the country. It was a proper operation. Running those events meant I ended up learning a whole load of new things too. I taught myself how to programme lighting rigs, I learned to DJ to a decent level, and on top of all of that I was also picking up my first camera and a couple of lenses and starting to take photos at the events. None of it was planned, but all of it just sort of happened because there was a need for it and I was the kind of person who’d rather figure it out myself than pay someone else to do it.
The Pandemic Pivot
And then 2020 happened, and I probably don’t need to say much about that. The events industry was dead overnight, and I ended up working at Tesco for a few months because, well, rent still needed paying.
One of my early food shots for Mexigo. This is where the photography career really started.
Here’s where it gets interesting though. During the second lockdown, restaurants were allowed to do takeaway and delivery only, and suddenly they all needed photos for Deliveroo and Uber Eats. I started taking some pictures for a couple of local places, and then ended up picking up a full marketing retainer for a brand called Mexigo (a burrito and fast-service Mexican place in Southampton). Photography just snowballed from there, honestly faster than I expected.
I think the reason it clicked so quickly is all those years of graphic design. When I pick up my camera, I’m not just thinking about making a nice image. I’m thinking about where this photo is going to end up. Does it need space on the left for a logo? Is it going to get cropped to 9:16 for Stories? It’s never “let me take a nice picture,” it’s more like “let me take this picture because it’s going to be really useful for that specific thing.” I’d been thinking that way about design for over a decade already, so applying it to photography felt completely natural.
My Dad and the Photography Myth
A lot of people have assumed that because my dad was a photographer, I must have learned from him. The reality is that he moved away to Devon when I was 14, so he never actually sat me down and taught me any techniques. That said, there’s no way I didn’t pick up an eye for how a photo is composed from the number of slide shows he subjected me and my sister to when we were kids. He was a landscape photographer, so it didn’t really apply to the style of images I ended up doing, but credit where credit’s due. Once I started my photography journey, it was always nice bouncing ideas off him on a call, getting him to see what he thought of anything I’d taken. And then once I’d overtaken him in what I could capture, I started passing on some of my own tips and tricks to him as well. Before he passed away in 2023, I think we both got a lot out of that. It’s funny how things work out.
I think I’ve always been someone with a commercial view of things. Even when I was writing songs in bands, I was more of a functional songwriter. I wanted to produce the most catchy song possible and really think it through, rather than getting lost in the artistry of it. My design style has always been the same way (more magazine than illustration, more functional than decorative), and I think that’s exactly what makes me a good commercial photographer. I just see the use in things.
Learning Fast and Staying Ahead
I’ve always been able to pick things up fast. Web design, video, various marketing platforms and tools, I’ve taught myself all of it. I think people with ADHD brains tend to be like this when something genuinely interests them. You hyperfocus, you absorb it, and then it just becomes part of what you can do. It’s rare that I come across something in the marketing space and think “I have no idea what to do with this.” And when I do, I’ll usually have figured it out within a week. That’s what’s made freelancing work for me. If the market shifts and something becomes redundant, I don’t panic. I just learn the next thing.
Photography has been the big one for a while now, and I’m picking up national clients alongside the local work, which is great. But I’m not naive about the fact that AI is changing the game for photographers. Some people in the industry are burying their heads in the sand about it. I’d rather stay right on the edge of it and actually use it well. I already use AI to build web services, refine workflows, and make subtle edits to photos (subtle being the key word, I’m not generating fake food). I’d much rather be ahead of it than suddenly realise I’ve been left behind. And honestly, if photography does get completely disrupted at some point, I know I’ve got enough other skills that I won’t be starting from scratch. That’s the benefit of having done all of these different things over the years.
The Bigger Picture
Shooting a wedding in Somerset. Every event draws on everything I've picked up over the years.
Right now, my main retainer client is Padharo (an Indian restaurant here in Southampton), where I handle pretty much the full marketing picture for them. But I’ve also started doing hospitality consultancy for other restaurants and similar businesses, which is something I didn’t really plan but fell into because of all the experience I’d built up. I’ll go into a venue and suggest things like how to change their lighting (I’m a photographer, so I’m absolutely obsessed with lighting - ask anyone who’s ever been to a restaurant or a hotel with me, I literally can’t stop commenting on it), or how their menu could be laid out differently to have more of an impact, or why their placement on Google isn’t working as well as it should. That kind of thing. It draws on everything I’ve picked up over the years, not just the photography.
My brain never really switches off from this stuff, to be fair. I’m constantly thinking about how things work, why things work, the psychology behind why people react to certain marketing or certain environments. I read a lot of non-fiction around sociology and psychology, partly because I find it fascinating and partly because it directly feeds into the work I do. I still love music, I still travel solo whenever I can, and I get a ridiculous amount of inspiration from seeing how other people in other countries are running restaurants, designing spaces, creating experiences. I bring all of that back with me.
If there’s a point to all of this, it’s probably that I’ve never really stayed still. Gig posters at 17, touring in bands, graphic design, nightclubs, agencies, a stint in Tesco, and now photography and marketing consultancy. None of it was planned as a career path, but none of it was wasted either. Every single one of those experiences taught me something that I still use. I don’t think I’m done picking up new things yet, and I’m sort of glad I can’t predict what’s next. That’s always been the fun part.
If you’d like to work with me, whether that’s photography, marketing consultancy, or something else entirely, get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
