Last Sunday was exactly 50 years since I started work as a photographer, I feel so lucky to have done so.
I could never have realised that doing a newspaper round in my early teens would play such an important part in my life.
I loved newspapers and, like almost all kids doing a paper round, I used to read some of them before delivering them through letterboxes.
My hobby was film making and taking photographs and decided that if it were possible, I wanted to be a newspaper photographer.
I always thought my dream assignment would be to photograph a Moon launch from Cape Kennedy.
By the time I entered the sixth form at school, I decide that I would travel to Florida to photograph the Apollo 17 launch, the last flight to the moon.
I wrote to NASA in Washington DC saying that I was attending the launch to write a story and do pictures for a college magazine (a slight light lie, it was actually the school magazine) and they responded by giving me press accreditation for the launch.
This only increased my desire to work as a photographer and when I returned from the States, I was given the opportunity by the local newspaper to take a job as a trainee photographer.
The only problem was that they wanted to me start straight away which meant I had to leave school a couple of days later.
The day I started work, I should have been sitting my mock A-levels, so I ended up never taking them. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made.
In the 70s and 80s, in addition to normal news jobs, I covered many more events at the Kennedy Space Centre, including the Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz and Space Shuttle launches.
The pictures I took were published in 43 different countries.
Since then, having gone freelance in 1995, I have had a fantastic working life, covering so many events, meeting so many wonderful people and in some very small way, recording moments in history.
In recent years, I’ve enjoyed working for the Wokingham Today and more recently, the Reading Today newspapers and I hope to be able to continue to do that for some time to come.
This year, I hope to give a series of talks to groups that maybe interested in seeing my photographs that I took at the Kennedy Space Centre.
