A potted history:
In 1984, after studying photography and film at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham for 3 years, I moved to London and got a position at Tony Stone Images in the darkroom under the generous guidance of Matt Lambert.
At Tony Stone Images I developed an understanding of Stock Photography and in my own time produced images that sold well enough for me to leave the full time job and concentrate on making saleable images.
In 1990 Tony called me back to the company to help set up and run a creative digital imaging department.
Those were the very early days of digital (Photoshop was a toy in those days for playing with low res images) and it was during this period that I learned the trade and was able to pass on this knowledge to the new staff I took on as the department expanded.
In 1995 at great expense, I bought my own Silicon Graphics Barco Creator retouching system. In 1997 I moved to Norfolk to concentrate once again on my stock work.
After a few years Macs and PCs were speeding up enough to make Photoshop a practical proposition for working on repro sized images and this made it possible for more businesses to afford digital. I took the opportunity to develop a consultancy business to help out small specialist photo libraries, With the advent of good quality digital cameras I started to help photographers directly.
I incorporated the business into Copyrightimage Ltd in 2003
If you would like so see some more of my early film photography I have a personal website full of random images and thoughts: https://stephenjohnson.co.uk