While still a student he had photographs published in Varsity as well as a magazine he co-founded, Image;[7] and did photostories for the Daily Express, Queen, and (on night climbing) Life.
[n 2] Colour photography was "a medium in which Bulmer was the British pioneer", far ahead of such photographers as William Eggleston and Martin Parr.
[6][n 3] Grant Scott has described the results: Saturated but muted colours combined with [Bulmer's] compositional talent to create images which are time capsules as contemporary today as they were then.
[5]The priorities of the Sunday Times Magazine changed in the 1970s; its then-new editor Hunter Davies explained them to Bulmer as "crime, middle-class living and fashion".
[4] The editor of Town, David Hughes, introduced Bulmer to his wife, Mai Zetterling, with whom he then occasionally worked as cinematographer.
[8] For some time, Bulmer combined photography with work in film, which was refreshingly different and also promised an escape from the increasingly limited interests of the news magazines.
For the latter, "Bulmer focused on little-known tribal groups, but treated them as human interest stories rather than exercises in the exotic": a perspective that can also be seen in his early photography.
Martin Harrison credits a 1983 exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery, British Photography 1955–65: The Master Craftsmen in Print (curated by Sue Davies), with saving the work of Bulmer (as well as Graham Finlayson and others) from obscurity.