The digital media co-ordinator and photographer has spent over four decades working across all of the campuses and departments, after “falling” into university life “by accident”. “I left Coleraine Inst in the summer of 1980 with eight O-levels, but we were a big working-class family — nine kids — and my dad just said: ‘Get into the job.’ And that was it,” he says.
“I started there as a lab technician, but that only lasted a few months because then the boss asked me would I help out in the photographic suite.” When the American man running the suite returned to the United States three months later, Nigel, who is from Coleraine but now living in Ballybogey, was asked if he minded staying in the job. “I left school not knowing what I would do.
The lab technician job came up in the university and I applied for it and got it, as I say, but that didn’t last. “The dark room was more interesting to me than the labs — a lot of black-and-white printing and traditional stuff — and then it’s the kind of job where technology kept moving and changing over the years and went from film-based photography to digital and so on.” Shortly after moving to the dark room, Nigel began a three-year part-time course that gave him the grounding in photography.
“A lot of the early days, it was mostly more printing in the dark room than actual photography, and then it incorporated more and more photography. Then, obviously, digital came around. “Everybody held on.