Concordia

Concordia Winter 2023

23

Wilbert

Lily

family with a great love for dogs and this was something which was now part of our family life. I found that I loved taking pictures of our working spaniel Basil and I was struck by the huge increase in dog ownership that occurred from 2020 onwards. So, the idea of ShutterDog Photography was born. After many hours of training, practising, and honing our skills, ShutterDog Photography opened for business in June. We have developed a dog-friendly studio at a beautiful location in Wingrave, Buckinghamshire. Later this year we will be adding a carefully landscaped, secure outdoor space so that we can offer customers wonderful images taken indoors and out. We have designed ShutterDog photography to be exactly the kind of business that we ourselves would want to transact with. Responsive customer service, high-quality images and products, timescales that are adhered to, a clearly communicated and fair pricing structure and no hard sell. Mastering the social media side of things has been quite a steep learning curve, but the chance to have a completely new second career, based on a passion that was ignited at school forty years earlier, has been exciting and challenging. Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks.

activities meant that the time I devoted to it was reduced. I ended up on the “Science side” and when the time came to complete university applications, I flirted with the idea of applying to Heriott-Watt to study for a degree in Brewing. I had by this stage become moderately successful at home brewing beer (there was no Brewing Club at the school, no doubt for the best). However, when I discovered that the Brewing course had an annual intake of just eight people, I’m afraid to say that I concluded the odds were rather against me and my life took a different course. I ended up at the University of Aston, graduating in 1990 with a 2:1 degree in Business Administration. After training with KPMG in Birmingham (and finding the audit work interminably tedious) I joined my uncle, Julian Humphrey (1959-1966), and we successfully ran a small accountancy practice in Buckinghamshire until his retirement in 2008. I then soldiered on with the business right through until 2021 when I decided that enough was enough and I needed a change of direction. I sold the business in March 2021 and then considered my next move. Having never derived much pleasure from the accountancy world, I determined that in my next career I would do something that I enjoyed. My wife Ruth was brought up in a

www.shutterdog.co.uk chris@shutterdog.co.uk