Like many other people, my choice in career did not come to me when I was young. I didn’t know from the age of six that being a designer was what I wanted to make of my life. Especially as I probably would not have been taught the word ‘designer’ at school yet. My career path growing up was simple. At the age of five, a child contestant on ‘Fun House’ was my greatest ambition. At the age of ten a volcanologist was all I set my heart on. And by fifteen, I would settle for nothing less than a hybrid mix of the Head of MI5 and the female Ranulph Fiennes. It may not be entirely surprising that now, at twenty-two, this obviously is not exactly where my choices have taken me.

Throughout school, it was gently suggested and assumed by my teachers, that any career I would have, would be an academic one. Doctor, scientist, barrister… Astronaut! All things that require a measurable amount of knowledge and specific qualifications. I realise now that the reason I never remember wanting to be a designer, was because it was never given as an option. It was seen as a hobby, as a pass-time. Definitely not a career. So, through school and Sixth Form, I turned to my mother’s career in Law as the template for my own. ‘Follow the family business’ was probably the most relevant adage. I never felt like I was looking to Law for this exact reason. But, I could happily and confidently skip over the muffled void in my career choices, because it felt comfortable. It was vicariously part of my life. So, I had my answer.

All the while, not wanting to dampen my creative spirit and flair, which once oddly lead me to draw a pineapple and a kettle on a napkin at dinner party, I still carried on my studies in Graphic Design. This was my one ‘non-academic’ subject that was advised we have at college. I would spend hours upon hours doing my work. Carefully drawing, shading and finelining like a highly accurate maniac. But, I loved it. It wasn’t anything like work for me. I did extra sheets of work, came in early to lessons and would listen absolutely intently to my teachers when explaining the finer points of technical drawing and the questionable temperament of the new printers. Obviously, interesting stuff!

It was only after being accepted into university to study Law that I, in absolute honesty, woke up one day, realising that it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wasn’t excited about the imminent prospect of spending the rest of my life with my head buried in the philosophy of jurisprudence. And then came that immortally haunting question; ‘So, what do you want to do then?’. Without thinking, ‘I want to be a designer’ fell out as an awkwardly precise yet confident answer. I knew then, that despite changing my career path from one polar opposite to another, that this was really what I wanted. I was following the one area of my life, other than my nerd-like love for National Geographic, that was a pure passion. Something that I truly loved to do.

After an intensive time at university, I have graduated and am now finding my own way in the world; with the freedom and expression that only design could have given me. I can never pinpoint what exactly it is that makes me excited to get up on a Monday morning. But knowing that all areas of design can influence most tangible parts of our everyday lives, probably has something to do with it. You can see your work, and that of others, change things around you. Change the way things work, look and communicate. Which, in a fast moving world, is something to treasure.

No two days are ever the same and you wake up not knowing what you could be working on that day. New projects are exciting and completing the tougher ones, are unbelievably satisfying. I relish in designing things for clients that they love, which can make them excited to work too. I love to sit and think of the biggest blue-sky ideas and then find ways to make them applicable to everyday life because design is everywhere you look and everywhere you go.

There has never any danger of my life being one-dimensional. Listening to others explain their career paths, it seemed so simple. Whereas I look at mine as an elaborate mix of confusing yet fulfilling choices, that have eventually lead me into a career that I would never trade. Yes, there are still questions that I will have to answer that will shape my path in the future, but I have learned through experience that whatever happens, happens for a reason. I’m glad that I do not have my head buried in a pile of Law books, mainly as I, now, would probably trying to analyse why they chose a particular typeface. But, I changed that path. And that was the best thing I ever did. Saying that though of course, if MI5 are actually looking for a female Ranulph Fiennes wannabe, I can make myself available. But for now, I’m happy where I am.

As someone who is used to hiding behind the camera and communicating through images rather than words, this is a more challenging piece to write than I originally thought. The old adages “start from the beginning”, and “write what you know” are floating around my head, nudging me towards giving you either a full life history (yawn), or the shortest blog ever written respectively. But perhaps expression through words is not so different from photographs; there are still the key elements of subject, framework, and a need for illustration. With that in mind, I will try my best to explain myself and how I’ve grown with my camera – affectionately dubbed ‘My Other Limb’ – a little better than, “I like taking photos”.

Over the years, I have grown fond of the fact that I came to photography later in life. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to say, “Yes, I’ve always known I wanted to be a photographer”, but that wasn’t quite my path. Though I have been told that I had a camera in my hand from a very early age, my attempts at (and I use this term loosely) photography certainly weren’t creative, but were rather an effort to record the world around me simply because I could.

Throughout my teenage years, I continued this “can snap, will snap” approach using basic film cameras (including the oh-so-modern APS film system!), and eventually graduating to a digital point-and-shoot at the grand old age of 20. Having my first compact digital camera was when I started to really show my knack for shooting everything and anything around me; freed by the medium of infinite “film”, and going to university that same year gave me many new opportunities for photographic exploration. Whiteknights Lake on the Reading campus became a haven of nature walks, bird spotting, and season changes for me and My Other Limb. I gradually began to hunger for more variety for my shots, and for different, more flexible cameras.

It was still not until 2008 that I got my first digital SLR and, with this development, I also started the My Other Limb photography blog, which now – over three years later! – serves both as a portfolio and as a historical record of my progress as a photographer. Only after starting the blog did I feel it was permissible to label myself as “a photographer”, albeit one in training, and started to think and learn about how to take good photos, not just all the photos I could.

I realised that I had always seen the world through something of a lens, finding beauty in the mundane or intrigue in the ostensibly normal, and I would frame real world scenarios as though already photos on a mantelpiece. As a child, I sensed an emotional fluctuation as light changed, and felt like this kind of atmosphere, or the feeling of being in a place, might be captured by film. Perhaps these feelings could be conjured by an interpretive, sensitive photographer, to inspire the same feeling in a viewer of the photo without having to travel to the location itself.

As an adult, I have always loved candid shots of people interacting, interpreting relationships through distance and poise. Seeing the world in stills, and wanting to record it, was and is second nature to me. Perhaps my acceptance of my “late” start to photography is not just because I feel I came to it professionally at the right time, but also because I’ve always felt like a photographer, like it is part of me.

Initially, my natural instinct to capture my surroundings, or to find surroundings to capture, never seemed to warrant further analysis or some kind of official statement of intent. On reflection, though, that really is what my photography is about: recording the world around me. Not very much has changed in terms of how important it is to me to get that photo, or even just a photo, and it doesn’t get any more complex than that. I am inevitably attached to a camera of some kind during my waking hours. I will just as happily shoot an abstract idea as an event with real live people. Everything can be photographed, and I take joy from it all.

One thing I don’t enjoy is presenting my photos as already interpreted even if the image did have some kind of purpose for or meaning to me. This is why the majority of my published images are titled merely with song lyrics or poetry snippets, distancing my own personal reasons for taking the photo. This is also the most likely cause why I am uncomfortable writing a 1000 word piece about why I think I take a good photo.

So, maybe my initial thoughts about this post were right. Introducing and explaining myself is a complicated (and rather daunting) task; there are all sorts of things that I might tell you about me, my background, and my lifelong love of photography. I also know that I could wax lyrical about how I am really looking forward to exploring and presenting photography through words on this blog, and how excited and lucky I feel to have the opportunity to share my passion with others in this way. But for now, let’s keep it simple. My name is Eve. I like taking photos.

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