TOM GOLD

I’m a full time professional photographer, with over twenty years of experience. I mostly work in London shooting interiors, food & drink and providing lifestyle photography for a range of businesses, agencies and commercial clients. I’m confident working both independently and as part of a team, with creative producers, art directors and stylists. Having recently moved in to an architecturally interesting Art Deco house in Broadstairs, Kent with my wife and two sons (11 & 14), I’m also currently in the process of renovating and developing a shoot location for commercial photography and film shoots.

My interest of visual image doesn’t stop at photography, as I’m continuously drawing inspiration from everything around me. Art, nature, architecture, people, film, clothes, the materials and form of the everyday objects that surround us and the distinct differences in style and fashion of past decades. In my free time I have a real passion for making, building and crafting things, using wood or metal and renovating old things that I’ve collected along the way (some library step ladders with brass inlaid steps, a 1950’s boys bicycle, the sash windows on my lovely old house, a collection of 1950’s alloy letters, that I rescued from an old local factory to name a few).  The quality of how these things look and feel always fascinates me and as with my photography, I always want to go the extra mile to achieve something really extraordinary (the prize at the end, is getting to photograph them when complete).

My background…

I started my career as a photographer over twenty years ago. A week after leaving school at the tender age of sixteen, I was fortunate enough to be given a job as a junior darkroom technician in a small, local company that specialised in sports publications. Although I’d never even used a proper camera before, I was drawn to the process immediately and soon wanted to start taking pictures of my own. Within six months of working in the darkroom, I was asked if I wanted to photograph a football match and after a few basic instructions, I found myself sitting on the touchline, clutching a large professional camera at West Ham United. Over the following four years, I was trained in all aspects of sports photography, covering London football matches for four years and supplying images for club magazines and football programmes.

I continued on a freelance basis, taking on portrait shoots, commercial projects and photographing bands, musicians and theatre companies. By the early nineties, I had also started using advanced scanning equipment in conjunction with early editions of Adobe Photoshop. I developed advanced skills in digital retouching which enabled me to work as a freelance retoucher for some of London’s biggest advertising and design agencies (M&C Saatchi, Ogilvy, Claydon Heeley Jones Mason, Alcone Marketing etc.)

In 2003 I invested in a professional digital SLR camera and continued to photograph events, portraits, products, food and interiors. Having had a great deal of experience across a a wide range of subjects, I am now incredibly versatile and confident as a photographer in any given situation. With my own personal interests being food & drink, interiors and people, much of my work is now focussed in these areas.