After working on a number of in house documentaries, he went to Naples with a friend to make their first, essentially amateur film. It won 3 awards (including one in the London international Amateur film festival), so the pair went to Alaska to shoot a second film, a documentary on post glacial species recovery that sold to 15 companies.

There followed 20 years as a cameraman, running a production company for 12 of them, and then a freelance with a tendency to shoot films that interested him instead of rather than those that paid the bills. As a result, among other escapades, he helped rescue a dozen steam locomotives from artic Finland, flew in microlights and hot air balloons in Beirut and Bhutan, toured eastern Europe and Russia with a chaotic string orchestra and went to St Lucia for three weeks to shoot a documentary about bananas.