I left school and home when I was fourteen, my only qualifications were a love of art and drawing. I found a seasonal job on a sugar beet farm and lodged with an Italian family, it was as close as I could imagine to being hired at a fair day, the upside of that was I spent no money at all. When the season finished I left  with enough money in my pocket to travel and a love of pasta dishes. Over the next couple of years I wandered around England from job to job, lodging to lodging, eventually I ended up homeless in London but after help from the Salvation Army and a dish washing job in an hotel, I found a job with a graphic design company, perhaps an act of fate or destiny. I started as a 'job lad' doing everything I was asked to do, carrying boxes, making coffee, sweeping up trimmings, packing products, preparing deliveries, etc,.

The owner was easy going and amiable, if you showed initiative and worked well you got recognition, responsibility and opportunities. I loved working there, the smell of the printing room, the ambience and intrigue of people working on creative designs, the ever changing visuals of products being produced and dispatched. I learnt a great deal too from watching others and being in an environment that encapsulated my interests. The company produced advertising and marketing materials including some contracts with large retail companies. After a few month my interest in the creative side of the work was noted and I was assigned to work with the design team, still doing basic jobs but purposeful and interesting ones. It was here that my path started to shape and my enthusiasm to grow.

I learnt basic design skills which I would practice on days off, I was introduced to the photographic darkroom, typesetting, silk screen printing and I watched designers working from embryo ideas to a finish product.  After a year or so I was deemed capable enough by the owner to be assigned my first project featuring a logo that the company had designed for Guinness, an upgraded version of the companies harp logo which was being launched with a range of promotional products. It was only later in life that I discovered that the Guinness harp logo was originally modeled on the harp belonging to the great Irish harpist Denis Hampsey who was born near Garvagh in 1695 and grew up in Magilligan, he become one of Ireland's greatest and oldest musicians and is buried in St Aidan's at Magilligan, in retrospect I thought that was a nice connection.

My brief was to create a template for a plastic advertising product that could be mounted on shelves (double sided tape on a foot disc) which would move (bounce) when disturbed by air or touched, this was created on flat plastic, one end attached to the shelf and a narrow stalk ending in a square, the weight of which bent the plastic over to allowed the logo to be clearly visible to the eye, it was designed for behind bar fixtures in pubs, clubs and hotels. I got great self esteem from that project and the fact that something I had worked on would be seen all over the UK and Ireland. I eventually left the company and returned to Ireland as city life had become overwhelming for me , I needed to re-evaluate my life and yearned to be back beside the ocean, I left London with a great deal of knowledge and practical skills which would serve me well throughout life.

Back in Ireland I spent my time enjoying life in north Antrim near Ballycastle and Ballintoy where my best memories of childhood are rooted. I worked doing odd jobs for my uncle who ran a business in Ballycastle and continued to sketch, I also bought a second hand Kodak Instamatic camera which was the beginning of my passion for capturing visuals. When I was back in a full time job I upgraded this to what I regard was my first real camera, a Russian  Zenith-E, a manual camera which came with a Helios 58mm lens, I followed this with a Helios 135mm lens, a Weston Master light meter and a tripod. I will never forget my Zenith camera, it was built like a tank, a heavy camera for its size with a brass top that I only discovered after the paint had worn away from endless knocks.

These were the tools on which I spent the next few years of my life learning virtually everything I know about taking photographs in the technical sense.  I took pictures of every subject I could find, I loved, and still do, the magic of composing a frame and then capturing it, then developing it and seeing the results emerge, though now I work in a digital darkroom. My photographic path had begun.....twenty years before digital cameras were released to the general public....and that's another story