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In Their Own Words - part 1 of 1 2

by Neale James Published 01/10/2013

As we all know, it's a crowded market out there, and photographers these days need something to differentiate themselves from their rivals, a USP that marks their service out as being one that can't be easily accessed elsewhere. For Newbury-based documentary wedding specialist Neale James the solution was obvious; as someone who had spent 15 years of his career in the broadcasting industry, his whole life had been geared towards recording and editing sound, and now he realised that this could be the ingredient that would enable him to add an extra dimension to his photographs.

"As they say, as one chapter closes, another one opens," he says, "and that's how photography was introduced into my life. I'd been in broadcasting for my entire working life, though after 15 years I'd become a manager rather than a broadcaster. I felt like the air marshal looking out of a window wishing that he was a young buck in the cockpit once more. I couldn't see myself pushing pens round a desk, and so creatively I was looking for something that could fill that void. I'm not sure I was inspired to pick up a camera by any one action, it just seemed to organically happen."

In terms of a sector to head for and a style to shoot in, this also fell naturally into place, Neale finding himself instinctively drawn to reportage wedding photography. "The genre of wedding photography has matured in the past decade, mainly due to clients becoming increasingly image literate," he says. "Imaging devices are more accessible than ever these days and image capture and immediate story telling has become part of popular culture. Staid and staged photography is now less relevant to clients seeking reality-rich narrative pictures. It felt natural to me to adopt the unobtrusive coverage a photojournalist would offer.

"The problem is that half the world's population now seem to be image makers, and so it's almost impossible to find a unique approach. Chances are that anything you come up with won't be unique at all, and it certainly won't be new. So I looked back at what I'd been doing in my previous career and embraced my radio experience, developing my documentary picture style through slideshows of photographs mixed over beds of sound that had been recorded at the event I was shooting.

"I came up with a name for these productions, which was Photofilms.

Although as a style of presentation this approach isn't new, in this particular genre it's fairly untapped. Of late I've also started voicing stories over these pictures in a documentary style, and that I guess does give me an edge. There aren't many photographers I know who have broadcast programme making experience in radio, and so voicing and producing pictorial sound and still documentaries using your own voice-over skills is proving to be an interesting draw."

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1st Published 01/10/2013
last update 09/12/2022 14:55:20

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