I once entered a photographic competition run by The Independent. This was in the late 1980s – the paper’s heady broadsheet days – long before it fell into the hands of a former KGB officer.

I can’t now remember what prompted this uncharacteristic burst of enthusiasm but, much to my surprise, I won. Well, I won one category. There were other winners and, when we were summoned to lunch with Andreas Whitham Smith, we were a large tableful. Only one winner failed to turn up: a nun from a closed order.

My prize – apart from the lunch, a resin statuette of an eagle and a certificate – was £500 worth of Nikon equipment and an invitation to join a photographer on assignment. I spent the money but never got round to accepting the invitation. What a twat.

When I started taking photographs in the late 1970s – having acquired a second-hand Nikon from a friend of my brother – I was following in my Father’s footsteps. He was given a camera as a schoolboy and snapped away at anyone and anything for the next 70 years. Mostly he captured the day-to-day life of his family. As a slightly disaffected youth, I found his camera’s omnipresent eye maddening. In hindsight, whilst there are many embarrassing pictures, there are some very flattering ones.

One of my favourites – of those that don’t include me – is a shot he took on a business trip to New York in the 1960s. It was taken from the Staten Island ferry, looking back towards the Manhattan skyline. In the foreground is a middle-aged everyman in an overcoat and a pork-pie hat, gazing at the receding city. It’s of its time, yet timeless. When I told my Father how much I liked it, he said it was a pity the man had stood in the way.

In the mid 1980s I shared an unsavoury basement in Islington with an old school friend who was studying photography. I thought him a much better photographer – and better looking – which perhaps explains my reluctance to show-off my pictures. Reticence or indolence? Difficult to say.

But what does one do when the pale horseman stalks the land? I spent lockdown sifting through boxes of negatives and contact sheets, selecting the shots I thought worthy of a public airing. Then I sifted through them again, deselecting most. The survivors I scanned and retouched. It took a couple of hours to remove the scratches and dust spots from each image. As the pandemic raged outside, I found it rather calming.

Here’s the result. Anything dated before 2013 was shot on that old Nikon. Anything after was shot on digital once I’d reluctantly given up on the intricacies of film. The precision of digital images filled me with wonder, but I fear there’s something lacking – some warmth, some vitality that film possessed. Maybe I’ll go back to the Nikon, I’ve still got it somewhere.

If you can’t be arsed to look through the whole lot, take a look at ‘Snapshot’. I’ll intermittently select spuriously linked photos and bundle them together.

And the award-winning photograph? You’ll find it in ‘London’. It’s the shot of a man, cigarette holder clamped between his teeth, watching Chinese New Year celebrations from an upstairs window.

Michael Mattinson