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hile most photographers will say it was a family member or friend who encouraged them to make the leap into the picture biz, Elle Zober has Noel Gallagher to thank.

Yes, that Noel Gallagher. The lead guitarist of Oasis, who has sold millions of records and had international hits with songs “Champagne Supernova, “Wonderwall” and “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” “He was a nice guy. You’d be surprised,” Zober said.

In the mid-90s, Zober was living in London and working as a nanny for a family that happened to live on the same street as the rock star.

“The street was inundated with press. They were climbing the back wall to get his picture,” she said.

Zober decided she was going to take his picture, too, and took a more civil approach to making that happen: She wrote him a letter. She remembers vividly what happened next.

“He called me. It was Sunday at 3 (p.m.). He was putting the dishes away from the dishwasher and I could hear them clanging in the background.” Gallagher explained that he and his band had an exclusivity contract with a photographer but gave her advice on how to get passes to shoot other bands. “I started calling the other labels, and I just started getting passes. The first pass was for a band called The Klingons. They were awful, just very, very bad.” Zober said she was undeterred and kept taking photos of other acts as they passed through town. In the next few months, hard work, the right attitude and beautiful pictures continued to open doors for the music lover.

“Within a year I was working all the big shows, and before two years I was on tour,” she said.

“It all came together very quickly because I worked hard and stayed sober.” In a time when magazines were mostly printing posed, stylized photos of bands in their pages, Zober said her work was a send-up to the iconic band pho-tography of the 1960s. Zober had a passion for capturing the raw emotion of rock shows. Her photos appeared in “Rolling Stone,” “Spin” and other music publications.

“It’s a moment in time. This is the music that’s going to change your life when you’re 16 and it’s going to affect who you’re going to marry.”

In London, she was able to shoot top acts on an intimate level. Though many were already stars in America, they were still building an audience across the pond, like Fiona Apple, The Eels and Snow Patrol (before their name change). Experience eventually led Zober to a steady job as the editor in chief of Scotland’s only music magazine.

After several years, a brush with death — she contracted meningitis — as well as a general feeling of burnout brought the photo artist back home to the Northwest. She considered herself retired because she didn’t want to go on tour again or live in music scene hot spots like NewYork or L.A. Then fate, in the form of Noel Gallagher, intervened again.

Zober said she was waiting outside the backdoor of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland one evening after a Travis concert (she had made friends with the band members years before) when out walked a certain British rock star.

To her surprise, Gallagher remembered Zober and asked her if she was still doing pictures.

“He said, ‘you’re one of the best photographers I’ve ever seen . . . you should keep doing it.”

The conversation was enough to make Zober reconsider her retirement. But despite being one of the most published photographers around, Zober found that she had to start from scratch in the Portland market. So she set to work shooting weddings, engaged couples, seniors and the occasional rock star. And the rest is history.

“It’s a rather unbelievable story, but it’s all true,” Zober said.