Alistair Cowin
 
I served a short apprentiship when I was still a schoolboy around 12, photographing weddings with Jack Knowles, a professional, with studios, darkrooms and all the other redolent chemical smells and paraphernalia of the 1950s. We then used 2¼ black and white in twin lens Rollies, and he was an early innovator in trying to expand from the modular group poses. He showed me framing and composition, developing, printing, dodging and burning, cropping and spotting on the print; and I suppose it is to him that I really owe my abiding enjoyment of making pictures. A few decades have slipped by since then and when a friend diversified into weddings I asked him whether he would indulge me as an assistant on some of his early shoots. I found I still loved it. Below are a selection of the less formal pictures that I took whilst in the background of the photographer that was at the forefront of digital photography from its inception. My brief can include everything from preparations to the last dance, and is then presented in beautiful books capturing the atmosphere, and the moments that bring back vividly all the memories of that day http://www.mypublisher.com/bookshelf/bookviewer.py?d=tq%3Ey-cppl%60je%3E3481157shapeimage_2_link_0