Neils Speer Photography

I was enthusiastic and had my own darkroom. I thought photography was a natural part of life because I’d grown up seeing the images my parents created. They had traveled as part of my dad’s job in the oil industry. They were always putting on slide shows for friends showing the places they’d been and people they knew. My dad – being in the seismic industry – had had the opportunity to develop transparencies in the field using the ‘dog house’ – which was actually a mobile darkroom.

After high school, I studied journalism at Mount Royal College (now Mount Royal University) which led to being a reporter and then editor of various small papers. Realizing there is no way to make a good living in that industry, I went into graphic design and spent about 20 years doing that. Through graphic design I became very fluent with Photoshop and gained a stronger sense of ‘design’ in images. And while doing these jobs, I continued to do photography as part of the jobs as well as on weekends and evenings doing wedding photography, magazine photography, and freelance jobs as a photographer for corporate and industrial clients – as opposed to doing photos for design clients.