Norfolk photographer Paul Damen is putting fifty years in focus as he celebrates half a century behind the camera.

Paul, who will be staging a unique golden jubilee exhibition of his pictures in 2004, has taken a quarter of a million photographs in his award-winning career.

His interest in photography started when his parents bought him a Kodak Brownie 127 camera as a birthday present - and now, aged 60, he is trawling his archives to find the finest shots for the exhibition marking a lifetime through the lens.

His exhibition in August will be at Thorpe Market Parish Church, in North Norfolk - famed for its photogenic churchyard, which won a conservation award.

The golden jubilee gallery of photographs will feature a selection of his finest landscapes, portraits, news pictures and commercial work.
Paul, who has been a professional photographer in Norfolk for nearly 20 years, began his career as a camera shop sales assistant in London's New Bond Street when he was just 16.

Soon he was studying photography at Regent Street Polytechnic, and he was still a teenager when he took his first professional wedding pictures, arriving at the church in Hertfordshire on a bicycle.

His career has included extensive teaching and lecturing in photography, and in Norfolk he taught at the College of West Anglia for nine years, and at Paston College, North Walsham, for five years.

Photography has been Paul's lifetime hobby as well as his career, and his exhibition will include highlights from his collection of dozens of vintage and classic cameras.

Today his photography business - based at his home at Paston on the North Norfolk coast - specialises in commercial photography and the restoration of treasured family photographs.

His work has won several awards, and he qualified as an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in 1964, and as an Associate of the British Institute of Professional Photography six years later.
The exhibition at St.Margaret's Church, Thorpe Market will be opened by North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb (his diary permitting) at a private viewing. The show will be open to the public daily, 11.00am - 5.00pm, from Sunday August 15 to Friday August 27. Refreshments will be available; there is car parking and access for the disabled.

Thorpe Market can be found on the A149 twixt North Walsham and Cromer.

Part of the proceeds will go to the church and to Priscilla Bacon Lodge, the Norwich hospice.

A total of £1,150 was raised for the charities.