Who You Know And Who You Keep.
For as long as I can remember, I've been ambitious, a go-getter. The idea of just settling into a "normal" job never really sat right with me, not that there's anything wrong with that, and not that I haven't put my time in either.
When I left college, where I'd been studying music, I went straight into work. I did apply for uni, but my application got messed up and I took that as a sign to move forward and not go down that path. So I got a job at Jessops. Photography was a hobby back then, and I couldn't see a viable career in music at the time.
For years I worked in the photography industry, jumping from Jessops to Canon and back to Jessops again, going from shop floor sales to becoming an academy tutor, and eventually picking up part-time food photography work on the side. And that's really the key point here: the ambition to not just clock in and clock out, but to do more. From around 2011 through to December 2019, I was partly doing something I loved, with some pretty solid clients along the way. Not bad for a twenty-something trying to cut his teeth in the creative industry.
Jessops Academy 2016? - Pulled from an old vlog I used to do.
December 2019 brought a weird but necessary roadblock, and I decided to step back from photography for a while. I'd already left Jessops by that point and had shifted focus into social media marketing, doing work for a barbering company who I still work with today, mostly in a content consultant kind of role. Then 2020 hit, COVID happened, and a spare room in the office I was working in suddenly became available. Enter National Sound.
That was the beginning of building my music studio with my wife, and with the support of my family, but mostly my father-in-law. Without his support, balancing a part-time music career alongside a 9-to-5 would have been near impossible. Over the years we built National Sound into something I'm genuinely proud of, live music, recording, rehearsals, and teaching. But National Sound is probably a story for another time, otherwise this photography blog very quickly turns into a music blog.
Fast forward to 2025. Through someone I'd met purely because of National Sound, we got the opportunity to shoot a local music festival headlined by Scouting for Girls. Now, I won't pretend they're top of my playlist, but I'd have been crazy to turn it down. Music and photography rolled into one, and I was getting paid for it. Armed with my surviving cameras and my wife as second shooter, we shot the whole festival and that was the day the flame got reignited.
After that, Pixel Affiliate was reborn. I spent the rest of 2025 rebuilding my portfolio and figuring out how to run both National Sound and Pixel Affiliate, and more importantly, what to actually shoot. Going back to food photography felt like a completely different world to the one I'd been living in.
It's been an interesting nine months or so since making that call. The studio has brought photography work with it, some directly through National Sound, some just through connections built up over the years. Music photography and videography made the most sense: live shows, behind the scenes, music videos. That's naturally the genre I fell into. That said, I've really enjoyed shooting portraits recently, and there's a small part of me that wants to dip into weddings too, not loads, but it feels like a natural fit. So music, people and brands is where I'm landing as a niche.
Anyway, all of that is just the last fifteen years in a nutshell.
A lot of what I've built, I've built myself. I think it's important to occasionally step back and acknowledge that, the hours nobody else put in, the decisions nobody else made for you. That matters, and it's okay to own it.
But I'd be nowhere without the people along the way.
From my father-in-law helping me keep the balance, to my wife, not just helping build a business, but being willing to back one that's risky, and one that doesn't always make life easy. To the musicians who've helped me land some incredible photography gigs this year. The Roundhouse came about because I know the bass player in Paul Weller's band, we'd got talking through a shared love of music and bass gear, the kind of random connection you don't plan for but end up being grateful for. And the O2 Kentish Town Forum gig? That one I'll take full credit for, though I probably couldn't have landed it without the Roundhouse show behind me first.
More recently I've been collaborating with Dan at Melonwave, someone I randomly met at one of our events. We're in the same field, with a lot of the same interests, and it just makes sense to support each other.
Which brings me to the bigger point. Supporting each other matters. Sharing your friend's work, listening to their new track, going to their show, liking that one post, it costs you nothing and it means everything to the person on the receiving end.
We're all in this together.
So thank you to everyone I know, to those who've collaborated, and to those who've taken a moment out of their day to support something that isn't directly theirs.
It's definitely about who you know. But it's also about who you choose to keep with you along the way.
✌️
Images by Dan Grannum