Take Photo

I live and work in London – and unusually for a Londoner, I was born here too! Although I studied science at university, I’ve worked in the arts for all of my career and now work at Central Saint Martins, the UK’s largest college of art and design on the business side, not as an academic.

I didn’t train as an artist, and in fact due to poor eyesight when younger never learnt how to focus a ‘big’ camera, but since digital point and shoot cameras became available I’ve taken a lot of photos. However it was only when I got an iPhone 4 as a work phone a few years ago and my sister introduced me to Instagram and a colleague to Hipstamatic that I started to get serious about it. I now use an iPhone 5s for my photography (and a Nokia Windows phone for my work calls!).

Street photography started to be a focus for me during 2013 when I produced a story a week on Backspaces. I’m not really a ‘selfie’ person and in documenting a whole year I found myself inspired by the people and life I saw around me and that increasingly meant street photography.

This image was taken in Scarborough, a seaside town on the north east coast of England, where I spend quite a lot of time for family reasons. Scarborough is a typical British seaside town with a big, sandy beach and donkey rides for children. It also has a lot of British weather! This photo was taken in a massive rain storm in which I got completely drenched. No one was on the beach except the donkeys and the donkey man.

The shot was taken with a shooter app called Provoke, which I was trying out, and the brightness, contrast and sharpening adjusted in Filterstorm. I wouldn’t recommend the app – it’s rather buggy but I love the image; it seems to sum up British stoicism.