When I was in college I tried to get a job photographing for a national paper during my summer break. I was already shooting for my local town newspaper, and our county newspaper in high school. I wrote to a few newspapers not expecting much, but did get a couple of replies from the Mail and Telegraph. Looking back it was pretty amazing to get any reply at all, and something that wouldn’t happen today.

I didn’t end up shooting for any newspaper during my summer break, instead I worked for a construction company doing roofing so I could earn enough money to buy a car.

I never shot for the Daily Mail but I did shoot for the Telegraph a number of times a few years later.

One of the portraits I took for the Telegraph was of actor Sherry Stringfield. She was in a new cop show NYPD Blue that had just started showing on TV in the UK. At that time the UK got popular US shows a year or two after it was first broadcast in the States.

It’s interesting looking back at the contact sheets seeing which frames were marked up for publication by the photo editor. These are shown in the color contact sheets below.

I quite often shot a roll for myself after I had enough photos for the assignment. Usually this was B/W film and often ended up as my favorite from the shoot.

My portrait of Sherry was in my portfolio soon after the shoot, and was a good talking point when seeing magazine photo editors after I moved to the US since she was now in the new NBC hit series ER.