A few years later, I managed to succeed in begging my father for an SLR. Now this was a camera that I could expand my creativity with and as it was a fully manual camera it taught me how to shoot without relying on auto this and auto that. I had the camera for less than a year only for it to be stolen in a house burglary Thank God for insurance and it was replaced straight away! Not long after this I had the ‘tech bug’ and thus I wanted to upgrade to an all singing and all dancing new Canon SLR, but I only had a part-time job and this was beyond my means. The Bank of Mum & Dad would need to lend me the money (and for a change I did pay it back). After college, like all in their late teens, I was more interested in other things than work. Eventually I did get my first full-time job working in the print lab of Jessops in Leicester, which was a bit of an upheaval as it meant moving out of home. I probably learned more from my few years there than I ever did during my college course, but as much as it was an interesting job with good colleagues I wasn't destined to stay and I chose to return to education. A short foundation course was followed by enrolling on the Photographic Art degree course at Newport university.
