June 17, 2025June 17, 2025 by Tim Gander

Another (Almost) Anniversary

Apart from a break for the Covid-19 pandemic, this is an event I’ve photographed for 10 consecutive years!

It’s a bit of an outlier in terms of the work I do, but it’s always interesting and rewarding.

The Event

And what is it I hear you ask? Well of course it’s the annual IRTE Bus & Coach Skills Challenge, operated through the Society of Operations Engineers and hosted at S&B Automotive Academy in Bristol.

Yes, that’s all a bit of an eyeful of info, so I’ll attempt explain it more simply. Basically, it’s a chance for bus and coach mechanics (the people who keep our public service vehicles running safely) to test their knowledge and skills and to learn new processes and approaches in a competitive environment.

This year’s skills challenge spanned four days, each with fresh teams arriving at S&B from all over the country, with mechanics and engineers registered to compete in mechanical, electrical and bodywork challenges.

Each day was a hive of activity with welding, cutting and panel beating in the body workshop, and electrical fault diagnostics, tappet measuring, vehicle safety and roadworthiness inspection and for the second year running, a test of an engineer’s approach to testing a high voltage circuit; increasingly important as road vehicles switch to battery power. There are too many sections to list, but suffice to say it’s a long and busy day for all involved.

The Job

My job every year is to capture each competitor in action so that should they win, there’s a good clear photo of them for the awards ceremony and souvenir brochure. The images also get used across the SOE website, printed materials and promotional assets (posters, banners etc). Because of this, I work to ensure there’s a good spread of library images from each day.

I also aim to ensure sponsors get coverage too, with at the very least a photo showing their presence and ideally working their branding into an action shot or two.

By the end of the four days, I aim to have achieved a mixture of team shots, fly-on-the-wall documentary-style action images and a few posed shots too. At lunchtime I’ll send a few rush pics to the client for immediate social media posts, delivering the full edit before I go to bed.

The First Year

I remember the first day I ever shot this event; I hadn’t been particularly well briefed, and it wasn’t until part way through the day that I was told I’d need to get a shot of every competitor. That spiced things up a bit, but I got it all done.

Another regular challenge for me is that many of the activities involve engineers working with their heads down, often measuring or looking at something. I need faces, not tops of heads, so if I can’t find an angle that works, I will often pose a competitor once they’ve completed the challenge they’re working on. This year, on the whole, I was able to get what I needed mid-action.

The Next Ten?

I somehow doubt I’ll be doing this job for another ten years – it’s a lot of running around, bending and holding awkward positions for periods of time, but I’ll do it for as long as I can and for as long as SOE wants me to do it.

In the meantime, for this year, the past 10 years and however many years to come, I’d like to thank SOE for engaging me on this one and to express my gratitude to all the patient mechanics who have to put up with me in a stressful situation. Special thanks also to Richard Belton at S&B Automotive Academy for his seemingly never-ending willingness to help and for listening to my terrible jokes for four days solid.