"I am sorry. The 'Workshop' in 'Fine Print Photographer's Workshop' means it is the place where I work, not that I give teaching workshops", I said into the 'phone yet again. If I had said this once, I had said it a hundred times, having dropped everything in the darkroom to rush out and answer the 'phone. It wasn't the caller's fault. It was mine. "What a stupid title, you prat", I cursed myself, "no wonder people misunderstand".

I started the Fine Print Photographer's Workshop over 11 years ago as a bespoke monochrome fine printing service. When I had needed one, I hadn't been able to find one, only the typical 'hand' printing RC processors. I thought there may be other people out there who might be looking for a real bespoke service as I had been. So I set up a company with a title that I thought accurately described what I did, and for what I thought there might well be a demand. I was right. I got loads of orders right from the start.

I hadn't wanted to work in the city, and deliberately set up right out in the countryside dealing by post and courier. That added cost, but I didn't charge city rates in the first place, and I didn't carry overheads either, including staff. I did everything. When clients bought my service, they got me, not a work-experience assistant. But that meant I couldn't be available for callers - by sod's law a client would be bound to arrive and knock at the door just as I had slipped a 20x16 fibre print into the developer. So that was another reason to be out in the wilds in the countryside near Chepstow on the Wales/England border.

I overcame the lack of personal contact by corresponding with cassettes with orders. And correspondence proved really necessary. For the thousands of orders showed an alarming thing. The vast majority of supplied negatives were underexposed, and those developed by the client already were overdeveloped. I learned my catch-phrase "you can't make a fine print from a coarse negative" the hard way. My experience in coaching hundreds photographers into producing negatives that were capable of producing satisfying fine prints (a requirement I had never foreseen when I set up the service) led me to write 'Elements' in 1993.

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