Joseph Martin

My name is Joseph Martin and I was born and bred in Dublin, Ireland, a good number of years ago.

I’ve been interested in photography for nearly twenty years now having first started out wanting to work as a television cameraman because it looked so exciting to be in a television studio.

Unfortunately at the time there was no job vacancies in that area but from the course that I did I discovered that I had a bigger interest in still photography and moved on to study that full time. In the beginning of my photography I was actually more interested in working in the darkroom as...

My name is Joseph Martin and I was born and bred in Dublin, Ireland, a good number of years ago.

I’ve been interested in photography for nearly twenty years now having first started out wanting to work as a television cameraman because it looked so exciting to be in a television studio.

Unfortunately at the time there was no job vacancies in that area but from the course that I did I discovered that I had a bigger interest in still photography and moved on to study that full time. In the beginning of my photography I was actually more interested in working in the darkroom as it seemed a more steadier type of job, but then through more course work I found I wanted to work in a commercial advertising studio and I was also interested in landscape and architectural photography from my camera club days of going around Ireland taking photos at the weekends.

However I still had no proper job (because I’d tried every studio in Dublin at the time) and from using photoshop on the Apple Mac I moved into the world of Desktop Publishing and Graphic Design back in the year 2000. From the DTP course that I did I got a temporary job as a Graphics Assistant for a year mainly doing Powerpoint displays and scanning slides in the Mater Hospital Photography Dept. in Dublin.

After that I got my first proper photography job working in an E6 professional photographic lab in Baggot Street, Dublin making hand prints from slides using Ilfochrome paper and chemicals, also referred to as Cibachrome prints even though Kodak made the Cibachrome paper and Ilford made the Ilfochrome paper. Anyway I was there about two and a half years colour printing by hand, no computers involved (apart from the digital prints that somebody else made) and we were the only photographic lab in Ireland that did hand prints from slides. We mainly dealt with professional photographers in Dublin, museums and other companies. I learnt how to judge from a print if the colour and exposure was correct which now helps a great deal when I’m colour correcting the images in photoshop.

I have since moved on from the darkroom days and have concentrated on the Graphic Design industry having completed a two year Fetac course in Design. As it happens I’m currently working in what could be described as a Desktop publishing job ironically working with old postcards (photographs of old Ireland) on an Apple Mac computer, making prints, table mats and coasters from them. It could also be described as a massive filing job.

During the time I was working in the lab and on the Graphic Design course I had kinda fallen out with photography as I could never get that job as “The Photographer” and when I think of all the wasted years trying I could have had a “real office job doing filing” (yawn) by now. Its only been in recent years when I started to get the travel bug and brought my ten year old Canon EOS 500 film camera on my travels that I got a bit more excited about photography again, but I still kinda felt whats the point if the slides were just going to be left in the drawer. Its only been with the start of a few website projects that I’ve felt there is a bit of a purpose to taking these photographs.

So as you can I’ve sort of gone in swings and roundabouts with photography over the last twenty years going from one industry to another. Who knows where this website may lead me, I might be able to make my millions out of it or not.