Competitive drive

‘I learned a lot from just trying to create this ever-better portfolio.’

Lee Duguid dates his interest in photography to 2003. Having earned an engineering degree from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen some years earlier, his first job was with a company that periodically sent him to work on projects in Russia. ‘Working in Russia, I earned a decent amount of money,’ he said, and being in his twenties with a tidy sum in the bank, he decided to do the logical thing – he went travelling for eight or nine months with a friend from uni days.

Although he and his travelling companion were good mates, Lee said their relationship also had a competitive dimension. ‘We always wanted to beat each other at whatever we did,’ he said. ‘He was getting into photography, I was into it as well and as we were traveling together we were trying to outdo each other.’

Lee’s father had given him an old Canon film camera and he immersed himself in Richard I’anson’s influential Travel Photography: A Guide to Taking Better Pictures. ‘I was just exploring composition as we were travelling,’ he said.

For Lee, who had grown up in Scotland, the vivid temples, landscapes and ancient cultures of Asia were photographically fascinating. As a qualified engineer, Lee is perhaps not surprisingly