One day, photographer Ernie McCreight got a call from a friend to say someone famous was coming to stay at the Hamilton Princess.

The friend, who worked in advertising, speculated it was either Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Streisand or even Frank Sinatra.

The friend did have the contact details for the mystery celebrity’s agent. Mr McCreight called the telephone number and offered his services, still not knowing exactly who he would shoot.

A few days later the agent contacted Mr McCreight to say he was in Bermuda at the Hamilton Princess and needed him to photograph Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, and child actor Macaulay Culkin, star of hit movie Home Alone (1990).

It was 1991.

“They said if I could get him on the front page of the newspaper, they would give me $100,” Mr McCreight said.

That wasn’t any money at all, even in 1991, but he happily agreed to the deal.

Mr McCreight shot Mr Jackson and his group in the lobby of the Hamilton Princess, and then later in the hotel’s penthouse suite. There he found Mr Culkin and the singer of hits like Beat It and Billie Jean, throwing water balloons from the balcony.

“I never normally asked for pictures with celebrities, but I had to take photographs of the manager, so I asked him if he would take a picture of me with Michael. He did.”

Mr McCreight photographed Mr Jackson’s group on the way to a boat to go diving, and later when they were leaving the Hamilton Princess.

“By that time word got out that Mr Jackson was in Bermuda, and there were quite a lot of photographers on the island,” Mr McCreight remembered.

Mr Jackson exited the hotel through the kitchen and out the back door before jumping into a waiting taxi.

“It was like you see on television,” Mr McCreight remembered. “There were photographers running after his car.”

He confessed that while he liked Mr Jackson’s music, he had never been a great fan.

“I’m old school,” he said. “I probably would have been more excited if it had been Frank Sinatra.”

Mr McCreight first came to Bermuda in 1972 from Glasgow, Scotland, to work as a police officer in the traffic division. He brought with him a passion for photography. On patrols he often snapped photographs to send home to his friends and family to show them how lucky he was to be in Bermuda.

He met his future wife, Barbara, in Bermuda and was impressed by her Olympus Trip camera, which was better than the old Browne box camera he was using. She let him borrow it. They were married in August 1973.

“I bought an enlarger and started developing black and white photographs in our kitchen,” he said. That required a dark room, so he taped trash bags over the windows to block the light.

In 1975, he successfully applied to the scenes of crime office as a photographer.

“In those days it was just a small department, so your knowledge was all based on what your superiors knew or were prepared to tell you,” he said. “There wasn't really a lot of knowledge about photography at the time, or books on how to do this or that.”

However, he found crime-scene photography straightforward.

“You would go to a crime scene and it would be dark,” Mr McCreight said. “All you had to do was light the scene and get your flash exposures right. There was no automatic flash in those days, and cameras were manual.”

When it came to blood, he was always a little squeamish - at home.

“If anyone in my house had a cut or anything my wife Barbara, a nurse, had to deal with it,” he said.

At work he took it all in stride.

“I am not saying I went in there completely emotionless,” he said. “Some of the scenes I photographed were really bad, but I just had to put my feelings aside and do my job.”

Over time, he found himself doing more and more internal work such as promotional photos of top police brass.

In 1986, fellow police officer Roger Sherratt asked him to work on a special project to create a series of cards with photos of top Bermuda athletes. He thought it would be great for police to hand out to youngsters to build a rapport with them. The first child to collect all the cards won a prize.

First, though, he needed a photographer.

“When I was in SOC, Roger would come over and say, ‘I wonder if you could do me a little favour’,” Mr McCreight laughed. “He said, ‘I have this little project in mind’.”

They did two sets, Bermuda Superstars and then Legends of Bermuda Sport.

Boxer Troy Darrell, sailor Alan Burland, softballer Earlene Wilkinson and footballer Andrew Bascome were some of the people in the early card sets. They went on to do other sets such as Bermuda’s teenage superstars.

It was an exciting project for Mr McCreight because he was a footballer playing midfield for the police team and later for Warwick United.

He worked as head of crime scene photography for six years before leaving the police department in the early Eighties to form his own commercial photography business.

“At a certain point you ask yourself if you want to continue in the police or get out,” he said. “At that time there were only three commercial photographers.”

He saw a gap in the market in weddings and family portraits. Launching was not easy.

In the early days of his business he spent many hours cold-calling small enterprises.

One of his offerings was a series of photo business cards, known Trump cards.

“This was long before Donald Trump came on the scene,” he said.

Within three months of offering the cards, he was invited to a convention as the top seller of Trump cards. Then he added church directories to his portfolio.

News got out that there was a new photographer in town and business started to pick up. He started getting business with local hotels. He became the go to photographer for weddings, conventions and other activities at the Southampton Princess Hotel.

After so many years of photographing gory crime scenes, he found he loved wedding photography.

“I kept continually wanting to improve,” he said.

He went to conventions regularly to learn the latest trends and techniques, and was always eager to return to Bermuda to try out what he had learnt.

Photographing Michael Jackson was the pinnacle of his career.

These days his photography business has pretty much run its course.

“When Covid-19 came along and then the Fairmont Southampton closed, business was pretty dead for me,” he said. “These days, no 20-year-old wants a 75-year-old photographing their wedding.”

However, he is still helping with the Bermuda Superstars and Legends collectible cards, and took the photographs for a series released this year.

He and Barbara, who have two daughters, Lauren and Nicola, celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary this year.