This is the website of Beowulf "Wulfie" Mayfield - lecturer, creative photographer and great home cook.
I am a lecturer in technical skills for journalism at a London university. It's a job I never dreamed I'd ever do but it now feels like it's what I spent most of my working life training to be.
Projects I worked on before taking up my current role included promotional work for musician Billy Jenkins, making online photo slideshows, experimenting with stop-motion animation and presenting The Billy Jenkins Listening Club podcast. I also worked on photography projects involving musicians and another involving toy soldiers to commemorate the centenary of the November 1918 Armistice.
During the summer of 2018 I was a volunteer Reading Champion helping to deliver the 2018 Summer Reading Challenge at Forest Hill Community Library. It gave me the opportunity to discuss books that children were currently enjoying with young readers and their parents, read a lot of new and recent books for children and even prompted me to write a couple of short stories for young readers. I enjoyed the atmosphere at the library so much I decided to stay on as a volunteer library assistant.
I've worked as a newspaper journalist and sub-editor, a charity and record company press officer and written about international jazz musicians for a British national magazine.
As a photographer, I am particularly interested in working with pinhole and vintage cameras. I am very proud to have had six pictures published on the BBC website and one image exhibited in the 2014 London Pinhole Festival exhibition.
I used to be a performance poet and was a regular on the London alternative cabaret circuit during the 1990s. I was also a musician and played saxophone in blues groups and jazz workshop bands. Performance was a lot of fun at the time, but poetry and music both ran out of steam for me in the mid Noughties and photography took over. The poetry side of things remains more or less dormant but I've started practicing the piano regularly again. I've got no intention of performing in public but I'm having a lot of fun learning new pieces, tackling exercises for technical precision - the sort of thing I always used to avoid - and trying to become more confident at reading music. It's curious how these things can start up again after years of neglect.