My earliest taste of photography came at Badminton in 1982, when I was 16. I was accompanying my father James Whitaker, who was a journalist in Fleet Street and the royal correspondent on various newspapers [most notably The Daily Mirror], and the royal photographer Tim Graham.
Tim gave me a camera with a black-and-white film and sitting next to him at the water jump, I managed to get a sequence of Princess Anne falling with Stevie B. I was paid £50 and thought, “This is the career I want to do.”
When I was a teenager, one of my father’s jobs was to report on Prince Charles, who was the most eligible bachelor in the world. Dad would take me along to polo matches, point-to-points and horse racing. His life reporting on the royals and travelling around the world was all very exciting.
When I was on the newspaper industry’s photojournalism course in Sheffield, I freelanced for the Racing Post’s dummy editions before they first published in 1986. Afterwards, when I was on a gap year travelling, I received a call asking if I’d like to be their junior staff photographer.
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