I had just landed a job with the Portland Observer, and the editor said he would meet me at the track with a reporter.

He wanted me to shoot the first race, drive back to the darkroom, process and print a picture for that edition's mid-afternoon deadline, then drive back to the racecourse for the actual Portland Cup race.

This was a little disconcerting, as I had no idea who I was working with, and hadn't even been to a horse race before, but on the other hand, how hard could it be? I was given a trusty old Nikon FM2 and drive, a 300 mm lens, a few rolls of 400 iso film, and off we went.

It was 10 years, not quite to the day, since my first photo was published in the Geelong Advertiser, and it was a meandering journey to get into a full-time job in a newsroom.

My first professional photography job as a 20-year-old with school photo company Arthur Reed Photos, and although it was tedious at times, it was a great job.

I was introduced to medium format cameras and studio lighting, and travelled to kindergartens, schools, and universities all over Victoria, Tasmania and ACT. I loved the travel and the weeks away, and always had my camera shooting Kodachrome for sunrise and sunset while we were away.

But at the back of my mind, I still wanted to have my photos published in newspapers, and started to do something about it. It was the early 90's, emergency services communications were easy to monitor, and I set myself assignments to build a folio of news images. On weekends, in holidays, or whenever the fire pager or SES pager alarm went off, if I wasn't at work, I'd drop everything and head out the door.

Some of the scenes were amusing, like the ambulance that ran up the back of a traffic queue, or the Holden ute bogged on the sand at Eastern Beach, or the car that crashed through a house fence, coming to rest beside the 'no standing' sign.

It was different to the school or kindergarten photos where everything was under control. How do you get a Metz flash to light a whole street, when the film speed is 400? How do you process the film when you've fogotten what speed you rated it at?

There were also plenty of other scenes that weren't so nice and found it an effort to stop my hands from shaking the camera. The Nikon F3 was a professional looking tool, and I guess I just faked it well, no one seemed to care that I was there. I was never told off by an emergency worker, I was just accepted as a part of a scene, and a couple of times, even asked to take a photo for road safety purposes.

There was also the other side of news photography of was getting a print quickly, and I spent hours after work developing and printing. I devoured photo books and newspapers, and one of my favorite books was "Off The Road Again", a book of quirky Australian images by photographer Bill Bachman, and got work experience with a newspaper in the western suburbs.

To take the break from school photography, my wife at the time and I left our jobs and spent about a year travelling around Australia, and when the money ran out, the job and the Portland Observer opened up. I was able to convince them I knew what I was doing, and it was off to the race track to finish off the Portland Cup.