Our Story

If you have ever seen the movie ​“Slid­ing Doors”, you will know that in life chang­ing events can occur when you nev­er expect­ed them to. The sto­ry of aspect2i is one borne of a for­tu­nate hap­pen­stance when Michael Pilk­ing­ton and Paul Gal­lagher first made con­tact over 15 years ago, in very much a ​“Slid­ing Doors” moment.

This hap­pened at a time were both Paul and Michael had decid­ed to make huge changes in their lives, name­ly, to end their cor­po­rate careers and pur­sue a new life in the land­scape. Paul was a senior fig­ure in the Nation­al Enforce­ment Ser­vice of the Envi­ron­ment Agency based in Lan­cashire. Pri­or to work­ing in enforce­ment, Paul had stud­ied pho­tog­ra­phy and had worked pro­fes­sion­al­ly in com­mer­cial stu­dios as well as in land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy. Michael worked in the bank­ing indus­try as a CTO in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy ser­vices and was based in Bel­gium. He had always had a pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy and decid­ed to resign his job and take a year out to pur­sue this and this was when he met Paul. 

Michael was seek­ing out tuition in pho­tog­ra­phy and hav­ing been let down with can­celled trips and work­shops offered by oth­er com­pa­nies, he was giv­en Paul’s con­tact num­ber by one of them to arrange some 1 to 1 tuition. The fol­low­ing was a day in the Lake Dis­trict and a day in the York­shire Dales. In short, the con­ver­sa­tion about pho­tog­ra­phy was end­less along with their shared pas­sion for being in the wilds and a con­ver­sa­tion about how they could do it bet­ter began.

Many meet­ings fol­lowed and even­tu­al­ly aspect2i was launched in 2011. In the begin­ning things grew slow­ly, but Paul and Michael want­ed aspect2i to not be a tour com­pa­ny sim­ply tak­ing pho­tog­ra­phers to beau­ti­ful places, but to teach peo­ple to be bet­ter at their pho­tog­ra­phy and pass on their knowl­edge. Ulti­mate­ly, this was their pas­sion and it very much remains that way to this day! As well as run­ning Aspect2i, they are the clos­est of friends and still reg­u­lar­ly get out with their cam­eras to explore their own photography!

As well as vis­it­ing many amaz­ing land­scapes of the world, they both see image edit­ing and print mak­ing as an inte­gral and equal­ly inspir­ing part of the pho­to­graph­ic jour­ney, and teach­ing this has always been very impor­tant part of aspect2i. Since the begin­ning of aspect2i and until this very day, along with the array of won­der­ful coun­tries you can trav­el to with them, you will also find list­ed on this web­site cours­es and pho­to­graph­ic retreats with the main aim at teach­ing and shar­ing knowledge.