Tidy Eye's photostream

First off: All my pictures are my own and no one, not even Flickr, may use any of them in a gallery, feature or otherwise without my permission. They are here on this site for my convenience. You may purchase prints from me by using the contact option. Any of my photos may be used only if you agree to pay a fee which is normally at the going rate for photo usage, so quite affordable within the average business' budget. I have that rule due to past rip-offs and so there's a record. This seems quite reasonable to me. If you want free pictures I suggest you take them yourself.

I started taking photographs at eight years old using an old Kodak Brownie. I don't know whose it was but by eighteen I'd trained as a black and white printer, worked as a portrait photographer, bought a Nikon, Rollieflex and a 5 x 4 plate camera and moved to London using my meagre savings.

Stark reality showed me what kind of world I'd really dropped myself into but instead of panicking and running myself ragged like chasing around London after dead-end assisting jobs I just chilled out at the model agencies, drank the free coffee and listened to the grapevine.

You can learn all sorts of things this way and I used what I heard from some of the bookers to get what I'd come for which was to work for my favorite photographers. Model bookers are the secret weapon of the photographer's assistant.

Without too much fuss I found out when any of my favorite photographers were having exhibitions and I'd crash the exhibition openings, chat up their agent or them and talk myself into a job whilst keeping their glass filled.

From there I jumped into jobs with some of my photographic idols like David Bailey, Terry O'Neil, John Swannell, Terence Donovan, Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber at various rental studios around Primrose Hill and the West End.

Soon I was assisting many of the other top editorial and advertising photographers in the country, as well as gaining clients at for my pictures at magazines and newspapers and became a fixture on the gallery scene because you can network there so well and it just saves so much bloody leg work. People (clients) only use who they know so you have to be one of the people whose face they know and that's how you do it.

I took my first pictures of models through Synchro Model Agency's Jonathan Phang and worked with Sarah Doukas at Storm Models as well as Models One and TakeTwo Management and specialized in fashion and beauty work.

After this period I turned back to portraits and following my first exhibition, HEADS, in 1999 I traveled to the USA and began doing exactly the same thing only this time applying it to the film industry.

Soon I found myself schmoozing in Hollywood where I diversified my career direction and made lots of new friends, and parlayed photographing actors into working as a script reader via directing a short film and morphed that into a new career as a writer/director, which fulfilled a long held ambition.

Circa 2008 I'm running my own production company, Bullet Movies as director/producer/screen writer but I still continue with various photographic projects, some for a fee and some just for pleasure .