S hoe boxes line the walls of John Bulmer's library, a testament to the path he has trodden from his West Home in Herefordshire to capture the outside world on film.

They are shoe boxes in shape alone, for these are Rolls Royce editions, as are their contents.

Negatives and contact sheets tell the story of the award-winning photographer's adventures and creative intellect in documenting life, from the mill towns of the North of England, to the highlands of Papua and the rain forests of Ethiopia.

The way of life in those northern towns was disappearing as rapidly as endangered tribes when the images were shot in the Sixties, and a retrospective of Mr Bulmer's work, now on exhibition at the Hereford Photography Festival, shows an England that seems as exotic as the foreign assignments he shot for the pioneering Sunday Times colour supplement. Miners and pit ponies loom from the fog, head-scarved women clean their front steps on bended knee, washing billows on lines strung across a cobbled street, and men scavenge a spoil heap for coal.

Back in his library Mr Bulmer, a tall man, reaches effortlessly for a box marked Hartlepool, lifts the lid and peers inside. It is a shallow receptacle but a well full of riches. After a lifetime observing others, he is now cataloguing his huge collection of images.

"I have always been a great believer in dawn and dusk as the best time to take photographs," he says. "You do need to get up early. I also believe you must trust to your first instincts. When I was taking some of the North of England photographs – in Nelson and The Black Country – I had a job on the Daily Express as a news photographer, and they gave me a week in between my news work to do other stories. It was helpful not to stay too long. If you stay too long, things become familiar to you, so trust to what strikes you as unusual when you arrive. One of the things that comes with experience is having a better idea of what you have taken, but until you see the picture you are never quite sure. Cartier-Bresson (the great French photographer) said that the decisive moment was pressing the button. But I never quite reach that point; I do need to see what I actually took.

"Life has changed in many ways since I took the photographs in the North. Then there was a street life, which has gone now. Then it was natural to photograph children in the street. That is really not possible now."

The exhibition, at Hereford Museum and Art Gallery, concentrates on Mr Bulmer's work from the Sixties and Seventies when he worked for the Daily Express, Town magazine and the Sunday Times.

In the Seventies, he changed direction, and since then has photographed and directed many films on some of the world's most remote peoples.

They have won praise for the same qualities of quiet, intimate, observation that won him awards for his stills pictures.

A member of the Bulmer cider family, he was already "passionate" about photography as a schoolboy. When he went to Cambridge to study engineering, he continued to take photographs, first for the university newspaper, Varsity, and then for Image, a picture magazine that he co-founded. A precocious talent, he shot stories on Cambridge for Queen Magazine and the Daily Express. A controversial story on the Night Climbers of Cambridge, which he sold to Life Magazine ended his career at Cambridge, but catapulted him into Fleet Street. He was offered a job as a photographer on the Daily Express, then the foremost paper in Britain for photography. He says: "It was the first time anyone had been taken on, really, as an amateur. Looking back I have been extremely lucky. It has been a fantastic life."

Soon, he was shooting for Town Magazine, a fashion magazine that became well known for good photography producing ground-breaking stories on such themes as The Black Country, and The North as well as stories in South America, Africa, New Guinea and Indonesia.

He chose to shoot in colour, rather than black and white, unlike many of his contemporaries and, in 1962, when the Sunday Times launched Britain's first colour supplement he was one of the few photographers prepared for the new dawn. He worked for the very first issue – sharing the cover with David Bailey. A picture he took of a footballer was surrounded by photographs of model Jean Shrimpton's armpit. It was a small start but soon he had a contract to shoot 60 pictures a year, and travelled to nearly 100 countries to produce them.

By the early Seventies, the Sunday Times had changed its course, and with new editor Andrew Neill looking for stories on "crime, middle class living and fashion" it was time for the change to documentary film-making.

Many of his films have been shown on the Discovery and National Geographic channels, as well as on the BBC and Channel 4. They are a world away from the current fashion for introducing Westerners into wildly different cultures and watching the reactions. One follows the Sheko people of Ethiopia, as they hang log beehives high in trees, then scale the trees at night with burning torches, harvesting the honey at their peril of their lives.

Now with filming behind him, he is planning books on the sculptures and portraits of his artist wife, Angela Conner. All the images for the exhibition have been selected by Bridget Coaker, night picture editor of the Guardian and the Observer, and co-founder of the photographic agency Troika Photos. Mr Bulmer says: "It does not include all my favourite pictures but I respect Bridget and what she was trying to do in terms of grouping them. She has got something interesting to say."

John Bulmer's retrospective exhibition is at Hereford Museum & Art Gallery until June 21. Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday, 10am-5pm. Sundays and bank holidays, 10am-6pm