26/08/2026
**I DIDN’T GIVE UP PHOTOGRAPHY. I JUST STOPPED TAKING THE PICTURES.**
It feels strange actually saying this properly, but after more than 20 years behind a camera, **I no longer offer portrait photography or photoshoots.**
In truth, I haven’t for around two and a half years.
Photography has changed enormously. Phone cameras are incredible, AI can now do things that would have seemed impossible a few years ago, and the traditional photography shop — somewhere you could simply walk into from the street and speak to a photographer — **almost disappeared overnight after the COVID pandemic.**
I watched that change happening for years.
But I refused to let the business disappear with it.
Framing and printing had always been part of what I did alongside photography, so rather than walking away from everything I'd built, I went completely the other way.
**I became a framer.**
Not overnight, and definitely not because it was the original plan.
I threw myself into learning the craft properly, built my own workshop and gradually transformed the shop into what you see today.
And strangely, those 20+ years in photography haven't been wasted for a second.
The eye for colour. Composition. Proportion. Detail. Knowing when something looks right — and, probably more importantly, when something doesn't.
I use all of it every single day.
I'm still working with photographs constantly. I'm restoring damaged pictures, editing files, creating images, printing photographs and artwork, choosing mounts, matching colours and designing frames around things that mean something to people.
I still use Photoshop.
I still print photographs.
I still obsess over colour and detail.
**I just don't press the shutter anymore.**
Today, the shop is essentially a one-man framing and print workshop, and somewhere along the way I've realised that framing has become a second calling for me.
There is something incredibly satisfying about somebody walking through the door carrying an object, photograph, shirt, painting or memory — sometimes with absolutely no idea what to do with it — and being able to turn it into something they'll hopefully keep for decades.
Some weeks I can have **150–200 frames passing through my hands**, alongside all the printing, restoration and everyday jobs that come through the door. It's hard work, but seeing the shop busy makes every bit of it worthwhile.
And one thing isn't changing.
**CA Photography & Print is staying CA Photography & Print.**
After 21 years, far too many people know me simply as “CA Photography” for me to suddenly pretend that history didn't happen.
And actually, I don't want to.
Photography built the eye I use for framing today. It brought me customers who still walk through my door years later. It taught me the skills that allow me to restore, edit and print people's photographs now.
So this isn't the end of CA Photography.
It's the end of one chapter of it.
**The photographer became the framer — and the shop kept going.**
And as long as people keep walking through that door on Meadow Street, I'll keep doing everything I can to make sure an independent little shop like mine has a future. ❤️
