A professional photographer from Cambridgeshire has traded in life behind the lens for a new career as a plumber.
Philip Reeson has spent his career so far covering a broad range of high-profile events – including the wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson and the Libyan embassy siege – but had also been renovating his own properties in his spare time with his partner.
He recently decided that he actually wanted to turn the skills he had gained through his home renovations to his professional advantage, however, and worked on gaining professional plumbing qualifications.
“I already do a couple of plumbing jobs a week, mostly for family or friends or through word of mouth,” he told the Cambridge News. “As I get older I am getting tired of all the travelling with photography. Maybe in four or five years’ time I will want to potter around locally more, doing plumbing and have a bit of a quieter life.”
He told the newspaper that he was able to fit his training around his photographic work and now hopes to run both his plumbing and photographic businesses side-by-side. Recent figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that there are more than one million people in the UK who are running two jobs parallel to each other, in order to make more money or to make their professional lives more interesting.