35 years a pro photographer
On the 35th anniversary of becoming a professional photographer, Nigel Hicks gives a retrospective talk about just some of his work
My latest online talk was entitled 35 years a pro photographer, and was a retrospective look at some of the photography projects I’ve worked on during the 35 years of my career.
Of course, with hundreds of projects and tens of thousands of images cutting across almost every photographic genre, it is impossible to produce a talk that showcases a representative cross-section of the work. So in this talk, I have picked on just one field of my photography, one that gives something of a time line down the years. That field is people photography, specifically my documentary style of photography of people in their real daily lives.
So here’s a recording of that talk. We hope you’ll enjoy it, even though it is a little long! Dip in and out whenever you feel like it. And read on through this blog for a summary of the talk.
Just click on the image below to go to the video page.
Watch the 35 Years a Pro Photographer talk here
A photographer’s life
I first picked up a camera when I was just 10 years old, an old Box Brownie that my parents dug out of the attic for me. That was soon replaced with a new-fangled Kodak Instamatic camera, with which I was quickly dispatched on my first ever foreign trip – a school tour to Norway and Denmark. This was a heady mix – camera and travel – and at the time little did I realise that that this one trip would eventually set mould for much of my working life.
Not that that happened rightaway, of course. The next 20 years were increasingly spent as a scientist, culminating in biomedical research in Cambridge. Photography continued in the background – even in my work – but it eventually started to come to the fore when I almost literally ran away, camera in hand, to travel through South and Southeast Asia.
It was while living in Japan that I started to make an income on the side from photography, shooting life and events in and around Kyoto for English language tourism magazines and newspapers in Hong Kong. A spell in medical publishing saw me move to Hong Kong, and it was in January 1990 that I finally made the leap into being a fully professional photographer. With Hong Kong’s booming economy, it was to be an exciting ride.
Early Projects
The very start of my 35 years as a pro photographer consisted of a self-designed project in Nepal, researching the status of loss of forest and reforestation in that country. It was hugely successful, and over the following months I was able bring in a good return in the form of magazine articles.
Similar projects followed in Taiwan and Thailand, along with some commercial architectural and interiors photography in Hong Kong. But it was my launch into China that would start to direct my life.
A move into China
Based in Hong Kong, China was an obvious target to try to work. In the 1990s it was beginning to open up well and economically things were starting to improve. Not too long after the Nepal foray, a Hong Kong publisher asked me to shoot for a book about the Pearl River Delta, that area of land and water lying between Hong Kong and the Chinese city of Guanzhou to the north. Although still a largely rural region, it was increasingly being built on as the industrial powerhouse of China’s new industrial revolution. I was asked to go in and photograph some of the changes, the old versus the new.
Sometime later the World Wide Fund for Nature asked me to photograph some of their conservation work down in a region called Xishuangbanna, a tropical area in China’s far southwest, close to the border with Laos. This was soon followed in 1993 by a commission to do the photography for Wild China, a new book about the wild places and wild life of this vast country. This was a huge undertaking for a single photographer. It was the first book to be produced on China’s natural world in about 100 years, and it preceded the BBC’s book and TV series of the same name by several years.
Wild China saw me travel the length and breadth of the country over 18 months, from the permafrost zone of the far northeast, to the high Tibetan plateau and eventually the Tibetan Everest base camp. I was often asked how I could manage in a country where hardly anyone spoke English. Well, thanks to my Taiwanese wife, as well as earlier forays into the country, I was rapidly acquiring a Mandarin language skill that got me through. This included managing to secure permission to photograph the famous Terracotta Warriors in Xi’an, normally completely off-limits to the photographer.
Into the Philippines
In the late 1990s I was commissioned to provide both the text and photography for a range of travel and nature books about the Philippines, building on my experience with Wild China. After some pretty extensive travel acroos much of the country, including to some of its remotest locations, four books were published. This established me as a ‘go-to’ man for the Philippines, and although I had something of a break from the country in the noughties, by about 2011 I was back there working on a host of books. This culminated in 2018 with my latest Philippines book Wild Philippines, an overview and snapshot of the status of the country’s wild habitats and wildlife. This is the first ever comprehensive look at the Philippines’ natural environment and has become an important resource for both conservationists and travellers.
It was also at this time that I began underwater photography, enabling me to greatly expand the offerings I was able to make when it came to both travel and wildlife photography projects. I first learned to dive in southwest England, and then rapidly applied the new skill to photography on the Philippines’ coral reefs. This continues to this day, the highest point being the extensive underwater work I did for Wild Philippines.
Photography in the Noughties
The noughties proved to be an extremely busy decade, mainly due to a single client, publisher Dorling Kindersley, whose highly illustrated Travel Guides required extensive photography. For 10 years I travelled about three times per year to the Caribbean, Alaska, Hawai’i, the Amazon, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Kenya, Borneo, China (twice), Hong Kong, Lithuania, Iceland, Italy and Greece. It was an exhausting but highly productive whirlwind of travel and photography.
It was also during the noughties that I started supplying photography for the USA’s National Geographic, initially for some of their guide books, and later for their image library, later known as the National Geographic Image Collection. This relationship remained highly active for about a decade, and although it is rather dormant these days, it is still in place.
This was also a period of massive change, with the switch from film to digital. Digitization began in the late 1990s, for me consisting of the scanning of film, a very time-consuming and not entirely satisfactory process. The inevitable switch to wholly digital capture came in the early 2000s. My initial tentative step consisted of buying Canon’s first digital SLR the D30. With just a 3 megapixel sensor it produced files of a little under 10MB, nowhere near a high enough quality for magazine or book publication, but OK for newspapers.
The big breakthrough came with Canon’s flagship EOS 1Ds, the first version of which was miles ahead of the competition. I soon invested in one, and quickly realised that with this camera and its image quality film was dead. My first wholly digital shoot was in Alaska in 2004. I’ve not shot a single frame of film since then.
Photography in the UK
With the first few years of my 35 years a pro photographer spent based in Hong Kong, I did no photography in the UK. Even after I moved back to Britain in 1995, I rarely worked here. Almost all my projects were overseas.
Things changed a little towards the end of the 1990s when I became the project photographer for Team Philips, a Millennium yacht project aiming to build a revolutionary catamaran for a round-the-world race in 2001. Based in Totnes, in south Devon, it was right on my doorstep, and it combined two of my loves into one package. For two years I photographed construction work and PR events right up until and beyond its launch. This included a high profile naming ceremony with Queen Elizabeth, held in the shadow of Tower Bridge, London.
Although a stupendous yacht, sadly the project came to nothing. While undergoing sea trials off Scotland in mid-winter, it was hit by a massive storm that resulted in it having to be abandoned.
UK work faded away again in the noughties due to my huge commitment to Dorling Kindersley. However, it was in 2005 that I started running photography workshops in southwest England, initially just two weekend courses per year. Although I no longer run weekend workshops, I continue with one-day events to this day.
During the 2010s are returned to working in the UK with a mix of commercial photography and books, the latter consisting of both photography and writing. The commercial work covered – and continues to cover – mostly architectural and interiors photography for property owners and letting agents, the latter including AirBnB.
UK books and accolades
The bookwork covered my own series of books about southwest England, starting with Wild Southwest, an overview of the natural landscapes and wildlife of the region. This was followed by my Portrait of a County series of books, largely photo essays each covering a different county in the southwest. These have all sold well and continue to do so.
A high point of the 2010s was the Fellowship that I received from the British Institute of Professional Photography (BIPP). This is the UK’s leading professional photography body, and the Fellowship is their highest qualification. For me, this was awarded for my landscape photography, and it came as a hugely proud moment for me. Along with my membership of the prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, I see this as a major seal of approval for my work from my peers and colleagues. It came as a massive confidence boost, something that is often badly needed for creators working alone in a highly competitive creative field.
Photography in Recent Times
The work I did for Dorling Kindersley in Iceland eventually led me to start running annual photography tours to that country, concentrating – not surprisingly – on landscape photography. Needless to say, that became impossible with the Covid pandemic, and I have yet to restart them, although I 2024 I returned to tours with a landscape photography trip around the far west of Cornall. Again this was landscape photography.
One-day photography workshops have also become an important feature, held in England’s southwest, and again concentrating mainly on landscape photography, although also including travel and wildlife photography.
During the 2010s overseas work focussed – with the exception of the Iceland tours – on the Philippines, as already described. However, there was also a project across Ireland for a Swiss magazine, and a couple more trips to China. In addition, I visited Washington DC several times for meetings at National Geographic’s offices.
Since the Covid pandemic, my work has concentrated largely on the UK, especially the southwest, where I have both worked for a number of magazines, and continued with my own book publishing.
35 years a pro photographer: so what’s next?
It has been quite a ride for these past 35 years. There have been a lot of ups and downs, but it has never been dull, and often quite exciting. High points have included swimming with and photographing whale sharks in the Philippines (I was one of the first journalists to report on the phenomenon). Low points have included being arrested in China for venturing into a closed area. Every good photographer gets arrested at least once in their career, so I take this as a badge of honour!
So what comes next? The pandemic definitely put the brakes on this train, but both photography and writing continue, largely at a more local level than much of my career has entailed. Commercial and publishing photography projects are set to continue and further develop, as will my workshops. I’m currently planning a return of photography tours and overseas photography and writing projects, so we shall see how things work out in the next year or two. Watch this space!
