This snippet from my 1986 Filofax diary reminds me of a few things about my early career as a photographer:

1. I didn’t copy many of the details from the written job sheets into my diary. Mistake
2. I didn’t keep a stock of film to hand and had to pop into the office to collect some rolls of transparency (trannie) film. Another mistake
3. Trying to get paid was a regular note in the diary for that year and most of 1987. This note referred to a job I had shot for a law firm a month previously
4. I have no memory of who Bill Piper is or was

I left college with a Higher National Diploma in Advertising and Editorial Photography in June 1986 and I had worked as an assistant for a couple of photographers whilst on the course. I continued to get the odd few days work from them until early September 1986 when I landed a three month contract to cover for one of the staff photographers at Haymarket Publishing who was off on maternity leave. For all sorts of reasons I also got to spend quite a bit of time working in the darkroom there but that was also fine because there was no better way to learn than printing the pictures of more experienced colleagues.

On Tuesday 16th of September 1986 I was sent to take some specific photographs at the London Stock Exchange. It was shortly before the “Big Bang” – the historic day when a high percentage of the share trades done moved from the iconic trading floor to electronic systems. My brief was to get a general view of the trading floor in colour from an observation window overlooking a section of it.

Travelling by train and the London Underground from Teddington to heart of the City of London with a heavy tripod, a bag full of cameras, lenses, film, light meters and colour-correcting gels and filters I was a pretty nervous twenty-two year old in a suit and tie when I arrived half an hour early. Steadying myself for one of the most important assignments of my life up to that point, I went in, shot the job bracketing exposures and colour corrections on three rolls of 35mm transparency film and was out of there again in under an hour ready to retrace my journey to the Haymarket photo office in the south-west corner of London.

These days the job would have been pretty easy. Virtually infinitely adjustable white balance, an almost inexhaustible supply of memory cards and the ability to shoot superb quality images up to 6,400 ISO and beyond. Back then we rarely went over 100 ISO for colour and the mix of light sources across that trading floor married with an absence of instant and accurate colour tests meant that the only way to guarantee to get it right was to shoot every variation that the Minolta Colour Meter could suggest along with a few guesses for good measure.

The first use for the transparencies was for a magazine called Litho Week. It was a trade publication for the lithographic printing industry. The set went on to be used across quite a few of the Haymarket titles over the following couple of months. I guess that we’d call Litho Week a B2B magazine these days but “trade rags” as they were known colloquially forty years ago were the bread and butter of my early career which suited me rather well.

A few months and years later, when I was shooting for newspapers and they wanted colour, I was well used to colour at a time when many of my contemporaries had been almost exclusively working in black and white. Haymarket had a photography team who worked across a range of titles from the ultra-glossy “What Car” to the slightly more down to earth “Practical Caravan” and then to the trade titles like Litho Week.

As a new boy in the industry I genuinely didn’t care which publication I was working for. I was being paid to do what I loved. The many tear sheets and covers that I collected featuring my work were mounted and laminated to become my first post-student portfolio fitted into a very smart rigid case that I touted around the newspaper and magazine world for many years. I don’t think that this cover lasted long in the folio but it was my first magazine front page and, because of that, it occupies a very special place in my memory of how my career came together those forty short years ago.

Whilst looking for this cover I went through the large rolling storage crate that all of my pre-1994 tears sheets, laminates and folios now live in to find it. I’m delighted to say that it was very near the bottom of it and so I got to enjoy a happy half hour looking back at that phase of my career. There were hundreds of front pages and about fifty of them were laminated for posterity along with fifty prints and a few mounted transparencies. To this day I get a lump in the old throat when I see my work used well – although nothing has been laminated since late 1993.

Technical note: The London Stock Exchange photograph was shot on an Olympus OM1n camera with a 28mm F2.8 Zuiko lens. The film was Fujichrome RDP100 (daylight balanced) and my best guess is that the colour correction would have been a Kodak Wratten 30CC gel in a Cokin Pro gel frame and filter holder. The tripod would have been a Manfrotto Triaut with a three-way pan and tilt head.