Senior Medical Photographer
Addenbrookes Hospital

Jaclyn M

00:00:01 I’m Jaclyn M and I’m a Senior Medical Photographer here at Addenbrookes. We photograph patients who come along. It can be before and after surgery, a lot of stuff from A & E, a lot of stuff from plastic surgery. We also do a lot of PR photography as well, so we can go out and do some really nice pictures of the site, you know, we can do exciting stuff as well as gory stuff.

00:00:27 I’ve always been quite artistic throughout my whole life, and at school I was always encouraged to do Art. I think I thought I was going to be an artist or something, or a Graphic Designer or something like that. I then wanted to go to Glasgow Art School, and I wanted to do Fine Art there. I didn’t get in, and they suggested I did a portfolio year. So that’s basically why I did an HNC in Art and Design. Then I applied to do Illustration, didn’t get in to Glasgow Art School again, and I was, you know, really upset, ’cause I really really just wanted to go there. Because I got knocked back twice, it really did blow my confidence and I was like you know thinking well, I can’t get in to a University, I can’t get in anywhere.

00:01:10 It definitely set me back quite a bit, not getting in there, but I had also – I was also more prepared this time, and I got accepted to two other places. When I went to the University to talk to them about doing an Illustration type degree, they suggested to me why don’t you do Medical Illustration? I thought well, yeah, that sounds really interesting. I started doing it and they also trained me in Photography, and Illustration, and Video, and Photoshop. And I decided I really enjoyed it and seen it right through to the end and started working in Medical illustration.

00:01:46 One of the reasons I nearly didn’t – didn’t start doing this course was because at school I hadn’t done any Biology, or any Chemistry, and I didn’t have any background in any of that. You know, I thought well, they won’t let me go on the course. But they said Oh don’t worry, that’s not a problem, you’ll learn everything you need to know on the course. In the final year we had Pathology, which is the study of diseases, which is so interesting, but really quite difficult. I think Biology would help, but it’s definitely not something you need to have, because obviously I didn’t.

00:02:22 All of the Photographers in the department were all doing a little bit of video work, and a little bit of video editing. And then the video work started increasing and people where finding like you can do patient information DVDs. Projects were getting thrown at us and there was no point of contact in the department to do video work, and my boss created a Video Producer role. And I got promoted into that a couple of months ago, at the beginning of the year. It’s something that I was burning to do, I really wanted to move on a bit, and I wanted to – I wanted to be – have a bit more responsibility. I really felt it was the time, and I then got given a whole lot of responsibility which I’m really enjoying.

00:03:08 ENDS