Tim Gander’s photography blog.

 by Tim Gander

Coke, girls and cameras!

Twice a year, Frome Wessex Camera Club hold a camera and photographic fair at The Cheese and Grain in Frome. Twice a year I miss it. In fact I must have missed it about 14 times by now, but I was determined to take a look this time.

Frome Wessex Camera Fair a table of Nikon cameras

Classics from Nikon and Leica to tempt the collector

I’ll confess I expected to find The Cheese and Grain stuffed to the gunwales with old guys in multi-pocketed photographers’ vests nerding over Leica MIIIs and Summicron lenses, or Nikkorflexollamas or whatever. Let’s just say, the gunwales were stuffed, the men were numerous and old and there was the buzz of nerding in the air. I even spotted one or two men wearing multi-pocketed vests, but they may have been anglers who’d wandered in by mistake.

To be fair, my age, gender and nerding tendencies mean I was in excellent company. I took the precaution of bringing my son who was going to have “none of that”. He stayed close and pulled me back from the abyss whenever my eyes glazed at the sight of a classic rangefinder camera. A tough task for any 12-year-old boy, but he did a super job and a coke in the cafe soon revived his superpowers.

Camera fair at The Cheese and Grain, Frome

Dive in, geek out and have fun

Brian Sawyer and Bill Collett try out a camera and lens

Bill Collett of Priston (right) tries his new lens on a camera Brian Sawyer of Melksham considers buying.

The fair itself is a broad mixture of ancient oddities (by which I mean the cameras, not the visitors… mostly) and present-day technology, but the emphasis is geared more to collectibles than modern equipment. I did speak to one chap who’d just acquired a very current and expensive lens at an excellent price. I was a little jealous, I must admit, but my son detected an evil glint in my eye and tugged my arm as he saw me starting to follow the man with the lens. It could have turned nasty.

There were one or two actual women there too and they didn’t appear to be there under duress. They were enjoying the fair too, and I spoke to a young woman from New Zealand who was there to enquire about adapting older lenses to fit her modern digital camera. She was impressed with the level of knowledge available from stallholders and seemed to be having a great time. She hadn’t come all the way from New Zealand just for the fair, but it would be nice to pretend she had.

For me the fair was an opportunity to find something fun to write about this week and to test a (nerd alert) Canon 16-35mm f/2.8L USM MKII lens which I’m reviewing for Wex Photographic. I know you’ll all be dying to read that review when it’s published, so I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s up.

Vicky Long studies a 500mm mirror lens

Vicky Long came all the way from New Zealand just for the fair! (I’d like to think)

The next fair is in November and I’ll probably pop along if my son will be my nerdguard. It might require two cokes next time.

in Reviews 4 comments
 by Tim Gander

The kind people have a wonderful dream

I must admit I was struggling for a topic this week. Then Margaret Thatcher died, which threw me into a quandary. I knew if I wrote about her it wouldn’t have much to do with photography; many great photos were taken of her, she was a great subject for press photographers, but I never got the opportunity to photograph her so can’t regale you with fascinating (snore) stories of the time I met Maggie.

Equally, I can’t bring myself to write about a corporate portrait session the day after such a big news event, so I find myself putting down a few, brief thoughts on Thatcher. I cannot deny, writing a political piece on my photography blog makes me nervous, but nothing else seems appropriate right now.

Ok, I never was a fan, but I won’t gloat over her death. And perhaps it would be trite to observe that she passed away at The Ritz. You may detect I’m struggling to not just “come out and say it”, so perhaps I should just say it.

The inescapable fact is she destroyed industries to an unnecessary degree. Granted, the country was a mess when she took over. I remember the power cuts, the terrible cars, and I’ll accept that British Rail was a basket case, though I was too young in 1979 to remember much about public transport, the steel industry and so on, but the headlong rush to lay waste to everything that could have given this country a sound future was frankly distasteful in its zeal, shortsighted in its goal.

Likewise, the unions were in dire need of reform, but now we’re left with very little in the way of organised help for workers finding themselves in need of a protective hand when they need it. Unfortunately, the unions were their own worst enemy and gave Thatcher the perfect excuse to have them crushed.

We could have replaced the broken, semi-Soviet economy with compassionate capitalism. This would have been achievable with patience and care, but what we’re left with 23 years after she left Downing Street is capitalism without a care, just the individual pursuit of personal wealth, resentment of success, resentment of failure, resentment of the disenfranchised and the poor.

I don’t rejoice at the passing of Margaret Thatcher because her death won’t change the route we’re on. The industries she broke can never be repaired, but maybe the next prime minister to be called genuinely visionary will be one that finds a way to nurture genuine industries and innovation (as opposed to the making of money by moving money around), make us all more understanding of each other, more genuinely compassionate and less self-absorbed… and I include myself in that criticism. There isn’t anyone in the current political class with such potential, so we’ll just have to hope hard for a future generation and spend the meantime striving to be better people despite the prevailing climate.

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 by Tim Gander

Portraits with Personality

One thing I’ve managed not to bang on about for a while is the importance of good quality portrait photos in business, by which I mean genuine photos, well-executed of the people within an organisation, at the very least the key people who need to be the face of the business.

I’m happy to say that fewer businesses and organisations are now using stock imagery as a way to project themselves. Of course it’s still a popular source of images for websites and brochures, but people understand more than ever the importance of including their own personalities in their marketing, but having taken the decision to commission some “real” photography, what other decisions follow from that?

The key decision is what style to go for. A portrait can be formal, informal, serious, light, it can be taken indoors, outdoors, subject looking to camera, subject looking off-camera. There are infinite angles and permutations and most clients want a selection of styles and moods so they have a library of images to call upon for different requirements.

The limiting factor to all this might be how many people need to be photographed within the time available, and how much time each sitter has before they must get back to their desk or their next meeting.

I often find myself allocated a room in which to set up my lights and perhaps a backdrop, but even this basic setup can allow for quite a variety. Outdoors shoots often take longer because the environment is less easily controlled and the location is usually some distance from the office.

It’s important to have a think about the mood and the style of the shots required and the context into which they’ll be published. I’m happy to discuss all this with clients looking for guidance, and of course I’ll talk to their designers too.

Perhaps the most important thing about having portraits done is to remember that these aren’t for the mantlepiece or the family album, they’re for communicating personality and values to clients, which is something stock images cannot do.

I’ve plucked a few random portraits from my archive to give some ideas of what’s possible. There are many more possibilities than I can ever show you.

Portrait of a University of Bath student

Using available light and a white wall

Business portrait taken in Bath

Outdoors, looking off-camera, using the available architecture

business photo taken in Bristol

Standard business portrait in colour taken using lights and a backdrop

Black and white business portrait of Jamie Borwick

Black and white, looking off-camera. This was staged to look un-staged

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 by Tim Gander

Fan Control

It’s an exercise in stating the bleedin’ obvious to say that a computer is an integral part of most photographers’ equipment, unless perhaps you’re Bill Eggleston, though it’s possible even he uses one now, I don’t know. Bill? Billy? If you happen to be reading this, why not drop me a comment at the end of this article to let me know. That’s if you have a computer with which to read this post of course.

Back to the plot, I certainly do have a computer. In fact I have a relatively prehistoric Apple MacBook Pro which must be getting on for four years old (that’s 50,000 computer years, 1.3 trillion if it’s a PC) and I was starting to worry it wasn’t up to the task any more.

Over the time I’ve had this computer I’ve asked ever more of it. The files from my cameras have doubled in size, I’ve upgraded to Lightroom 4 and PhotoMechanic 5 on top of all the regular software anyone uses when they have a computer and I’d become increasingly aware of the fan noise that would start up whenever I worked on images. Lightroom in particular seemed to get the fans working hard.

Sometimes it was as if there was a DC10 on my desk getting ready for takeoff, and I had been wondering if some harm was coming to the processor, which is what the fans are there to cool. I say fans, there are two in my machine, and a nifty piece of software called Fan Control tells me what the temperature of my processor is in ºC, what speed each fan is doing in RPM and I can adjust various settings to dictate when the fans kick in and what temperature they’re trying to maintain.

Fan Control preference pane for MacBook Pro

Hours of geeky fun controlling and monitoring processor temperature

I was alarmed to see my processor running at around 80 ºC or more on a regular basis, the fans straining to reach their top speed of 6,000 RPM presumably to stop the laptop catching ACTUAL fire. And then I had a brainwave…

When you open an older MacBook Pro, the hinging movement of the screen reveals a long slot along the back (see photo) and this slot is the air intake which the fans use to draw in cold air and expel the heat. So I got my vacuum cleaner with a brush attachment and gave the slot a good clean out. What a revelation! Where my laptop would routinely be running hot on even basic tasks like writing a blog, it is now silent. Running Lightroom still causes the fans to kick in, but instead of around 85 ºC, the processor runs at anything up to 20 ºC cooler.

Air vent on a MacBook Pro

Cleaning out the vents lets the fans work more efficiently

The laptop doesn’t run any faster, but it’s quieter, cooler and will be using less power. Plus the processor and other gubbins are less likely to fry and I’m less likely to be hit in the head with the shrapnel of an exploding fan. That really would be a disappointing way to die.

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 by Tim Gander

Goodwill Hunting

I’m thinking it would be too easy to write yet another tale of woe about a small business getting caught with unauthorised images on their website, and if you read my blog regularly you won’t need me banging on about copyright yet again so I won’t. Of course if you want to know more about this, read The Guardian consumer column which will enlighten you further.

Instead I’m going to tell you a new and surprising fact; Photography is more crucial to the promotion of business than it has ever been.

That I’m saying this isn’t perhaps all that surprising. What IS surprising is that it’s been said by John Owens in PR Week. If you’re a photographer, you might be peeling your eyebrows off the ceiling after reading that. Yes, an organ of the public relations industry is extolling the virtues of photography in brand awareness. I utterly commend the article as essential reading to all PRs who either don’t know, or who might need a reminder of the importance of good quality, engaging imagery for their campaigns.

Richard Noble of Bloodhound SSC project on the phone

Behind the scenes, un-staged photos (such as this one of Richard Noble of the Bloodhound SSC project) are championed by the PR Week article.

The piece even concludes with an immensely useful check list written by Matthew fearn, picture editor of The Daily Telegraph, for PRs wishing to get exposure in national newspapers, but which is also a perfect outline of good practice for PRs sending images to trade and local press too.

There are one or two points in the article where I would advise caution, as you would expect me to (knowing what a cynic I can be), but I think they’re worth a little extra consideration.

The author sites a couple of examples where big name brands have engaged the goodwill of their customers to help with social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. In one case Lego asked customers to send in creative images of their models for use in what was a highly successful Facebook campaign. Lego’s head of social media Lars Silberbauer says, “At Lego, we are at a stage where we would rather build a stage around our customers’ content than a campaign using fixed assets.”

I say, “Yuhuh I bet you would.” Fixed assets are expensive and customer-supplied content is free. I’m not actually saying brands shouldn’t do this, but it must be done in good faith and brands need to be aware that crowdsourcing can backfire.

In the case of Lego, where customers knew exactly how their images would be used, the campaign was a success. In the case where Instagram wanted to grab rights from its users for unspecified use, the exercise blew up in their face. I wonder how many times a brand loved even as much as Lego could use this exercise. People are increasingly aware of the commercialisation of their non-commercial photos, and while I don’t condemn crowd participation per se, I would urge brands to ensure their use of freely-offered images is circumscribed and boundaries are clear.

You might conclude I’m worried about the public taking PR work away from me, but that isn’t such a concern. As long as the public aren’t being taken for fools and brands play fair, I’m comfortable with this. Any business doing PR properly will have a range of different avenues for exposure, including social media and low-end imagery alongside higher-end imagery, press PR and advertising. It shouldn’t be treated as a one-or-the-other equation.

PR is vital to any business of any size. It’s bad PR to use other people’s images without permission, it can be good PR to ask for pictures if the deal is fair, and a good photographer with real newspaper training and experience can help you get exposure at a fraction of the cost of advertising. So go hunt goodwill, just don’t shoot Bambi’s mother in the process.

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 by Tim Gander

Reviewing a Gem

If you haven’t already seen my review of the Fuji X10 over on the Wex Photographic website I suggest you get there post-haste and read it without further delay. War and Peace it isn’t, but what you will get is a camera reviewed in working situations and which shows what the camera is capable of when you delve deeper than the auto settings. What I discover is that the X10 is a little gem.

Although I’ve only ever reviewed two cameras (the aforementioned X10 and the Canon G1 X) I can honestly say I enjoy the experience and of course Wex know I’d like to do more.

Test photo for Wex Photographic review of Fuji X10

One of my first shots with the X10, testing macro and low light abilities in one shot.

It’s one of those tasks which is kind of scary but also exciting; I know I have to deliver a coherent critique of a camera and I need to get it done within a reasonable period of time, while of course I enjoy getting to try out new equipment.

Wex give me the freedom to decide what images I take, but I’m always looking for pictures which don’t just show that a camera can take pretty snaps in Auto mode, but that it can be pushed and stretched (figuratively of course) to show what it can and can’t do. There’s no point me just stepping outside the office and taking pictures of buildings and pretty scenes. Any camera that can be called a camera can pretty much do that standing on its head, albeit the pictures will be upside down.

With the G1 X and X10 I wanted to see if the camera could take sellable pictures. In the case of the G1 X I sold a flood picture which I took on my first outing with the camera. With the X10 I used it on an assignment and mixed the results in with photos taken on my main camera as it proved very useful working in a situation where shutter noise would have been distracting. The client was happy, and it gave me another chance to show people what the camera could do in less than ideal conditions.

In both cases I tried the cameras out with my portable studio lighting, and both worked incredibly well. And although I don’t class myself a Street photographer, again both allowed me to have a go at this tricky genre and I was pleased with the results.

Wex already know I’m champing at the bit to have a go with the X10’s successor, the imaginatively-named X20, as soon as I can and of course I’ll publicise the article widely if/when that happens and of course you’ll read it, won’t you?

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 by Tim Gander

I’d rather be writing about something else

Here we go YET AGAIN! I’m starting to get just the tiniest bit annoyed* at attempts by government to destroy copyright law while claiming it’s progress.

This time it’s the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) showing a distinct lack of intellect on the issue.

Last time this was tried, back in 2010, we were at the cusp of a new government and the Digital Economy Act was being hammered out in Parliament. The clause of contention for photographers was Clause 43 which would have allowed the use of orphan works (photos whose author could not be traced) without the copyright holder’s permission.

Luckily for us, after intense lobbying by photographers, the Stop43 campaign and others, the Conservatives (then in opposition to the Labour government) agreed to pass the act only if clause 43 was removed.

Now it’s back, but this time it’s even worse and it’s now part of a bill, the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill, which is unrelated to copyright and therefore fewer people are aware of its existence. Even worse, if passed as primary legislation any future changes to the act will be permissible as secondary legislation without the need of a return to Parliament. Didn’t I previously say democracy was being undermined?

Clauses 67-69 effectively strip the automatic right of copyright from anyone who creates a work including photographs. Within those three clauses you lose the right to control your images if they are found on the internet but not easily traceable to you, you lose the right to say whether or not a photo can be used in any given context and you lose the ability to negotiate your own fees should you decide to sell rights in your photo. In addition, the bill extends exceptions to copyright so more people can use your work, including commercially, with no need to ask permission first.

Of course this is a dire situation for photographers whose livelihoods are built on copyright, but it will affect anyone who takes a photo they wish only to be used in limited ways. Amateurs and professionals alike will be affected.

The clauses also ride roughshod over the rights of the subjects within photographs to decide the limits of use of their likeness. It breaches international copyright laws, though apparently the IPO don’t know enough about copyright to understand this. In short, it is an ill-conceived mess reminiscent of reforms to the NHS, education, just about anything ministers decide to change before they’ve properly considered the issues involved.

What professionals and amateurs need to do is lobby their MPs, lobby the Lords and make it clear these clauses do not belong in this bill. Copyright may well need reform, but it’s too big an issue to shuffle past our noses disguised within another bill, and these clauses are not the answer. If the question is how do we stimulate growth in the UK economy, the answer has to be better planned than this.

Further reading and guidance on how you can get involved:

http://thebppa.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/the-copyright-fight/

http://www.stop43.org.uk/ 

*My entry for Understatement of the Year Awards 2013

in Industry Comment 3 comments
 by Tim Gander

Horse Meat Found in Cheap Photography

I was listening to Billy Bragg being interviewed on the radio the other day and while he was never one of my favourite artists, he has always made a fair amount of sense. On this occasion he was even good enough to admit his voice was never his strong point. Perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to an apology for his vocal on Between the Wars.

During this interview Billy was talking about the state of the record industry and the difficulty young working-class singers and songwriters face when trying to get a big break because of the way the industry has changed. The interviewer suggested that surely the market would seek out the best talent, regardless of background, to which Bill replied, “You know what happens if we leave it to the market, you get horse meat in your burgers.”

The wider point Mr Bragg was making was that the record industry no longer has a filter in the form of the likes of John Peel who would have plucked an artist from obscurity on the basis of a few good songs regardless of background. Billy believes it’s often the privileged kids from public schools who get the break and as he put it are “clogging up the charts.”

This “class” issue is an interesting one affecting photojournalism, and has lead to a situation where photographers have to self-fund coverage of events, then hope to sell the images to publishers who can force prices down because as they see it the pictures have already been shot and the photographer will be grateful to claw back some of their costs, never mind make a living. Success is now more to do with whether you can fund your shoots rather than pure talent.

I rarely shoot editorial in the purest sense now. Newspapers rarely call me up to shoot assignments for them (my previous post explains where they get pictures from since the collapse of their budgets), though I still shoot PR pictures in a style to suit newspapers. I won’t fund assignments in the hope of selling something later. I do shoot personal projects and if I sell something from those that’s fine, but it’ll be at my own prices and on my own terms.

Horses racing the final furlong at Bath Racecourse

Is your corporate image a winner, or a Findus dinner?

In the corporate photography sector there is also downward pressure on prices, but I decided a couple of years ago, even in the grip of a deep recession, to set my rates and stick to them. I have to say I’m glad I did because when I see some of the work being churned out by photographers charging significantly less than me, I’m happy to boast that their clients are not getting what I offer. I don’t think I’m some David Bailey of the corporate photography world, but I know what I do well, I stick to doing it and I charge what I believe is a fair rate for the quality and service I offer.

I genuinely believe if a corporate client is only interested in getting the cheapest photography they can find, they won’t get anything worth having. Newspapers have already proved this theory. Their imagery is more horse meat than beef right now. Businesses wanting to avoid the Findus fate will invest properly in their images because people aren’t stupid. They can spot bull in photos and they don’t need a DNA test for that.

in Industry Comment 4 comments
 by Tim Gander

Democratising Photography is Killing Democracy – An Essay

Alongside “digital revolution”, the phrase “democratisation of photography” is one of the most irritating phrases to come out of the… um… digital revolution.

Both are self-serving expressions designed to suggest something unrelentingly positive and benign; a conjuror’s sleight of hand designed to distract us from the awkward realities they conceal. The digital revolution (or reduction of everything to digits) has plenty of winners and losers, a subject worthy of another article. Here I’m looking in particular at what “democratisation of photography” means and its consequences.

Democratisation of photography refers to the ubiquity of cameras and the relative ease of publishing or sharing images electronically. In the days of film it wasn’t that so few people took photos or that you needed a licence to own and use a camera, it’s just that now everyone has the ability to publish their photos where once this was the preserve of the professional. Photo-sharing has made public what once was hidden away in shoe boxes in the attic.

While it’s true that publishing a photo is easier than ever, is this democracy? I mean, REAL democracy? Are peoples’ lives improved as a result? Will governments fall because the tools to publish are no longer confined to the photojournalist? I fear we may find we lose more than we gain in this exchange.

There was a time, not that long ago, when photographers of a very high calibre were employed in fairly high numbers by newspapers to take the majority of the images that were published. These men and women of Her Majesty’s Press would be out on the streets acting as the eyes and ears of journalists who were generally chained to their desks where they could stay warm in Winter, cool in Summer, drink coffee and write some nice words to go around the photos in the newspaper.

Much of what photographers covered was mundane and routine; Sunday church fetes, cheque presentations and mayoral visits, but also very often at the sharp end of things. Road traffic incidents, court hearings, sieges, house fires, reports of break-ins, covering the misdemeanors of government officials or those in charge of our children, all of life was visible to the press photographer’s lens, where it might not otherwise have been visible to wider society. And yes, sometimes a bit too much of life – the celebrity end got out of hand to say the least, but again that’s a separate article.

Photographers often found themselves at a tangent with officials of the state, having to educate police officers and court officials on the law surrounding the seizure of journalistic material or the right to take pictures from a public place, and often the photographer would win (and get the shot) because they’d been trained in these specific areas even when the officials they faced had not.

That era of scrutiny and resistance to mis-used power may well be over. The Bristol Evening Post has made all its photographers redundant. Not a single staff photographer any more. Much the same story has been repeated at titles all over the country and the network of dedicated, trained, experienced freelancers is dwindling as rates have dropped below levels enough to sustain a business. The training structures for photographers are falling away too.

Many of the photos you see in your local paper now are supplied via a PR agency or taken by readers and newspapers are happy to exploit as much free content as they can get their hands on. Unfortunately this has lead to a drop in the quality of local reporting. Many journalists only have enough hours in the day to sit and re-write (or copy and paste) press releases.

Local papers no longer battle on behalf of their readers or uncover the stories that used to help them sell. When newspapers rely on the public to submit pictures of events, sometimes scenes of crime or accidents, they’re effectively using untrained photojournalists (citizen journalists, another dreadful term) in situations where only trained professionals should be. Even at events as benign as the switching on of town Christmas illuminations there have been occasions when amateur photographers have been told to delete photos from their cameras or face arrest. Without the training to defend their rights, some comply.

How has all of this come about? Partly the general decline in newspaper readerships and thereby their advertising revenues, a decline which started long before the internet became the threat to newspapers that it is today. Executives could have invested in the future of newspapers, instead they insisted on unrealistic profit margins, only attainable by the stripping of assets and a decline in investment in journalism.

Newspaper executives believe their salvation lies in charging for online and dwindling print advertising, while not paying for the things that make people want to read their publications; good journalism reinforced with good photography.

What this coincidence of internet innovation and executive incompetence means is we no longer have the voice we had. It’s a mistake to believe online campaigns can take off where newspapers now fail. We need well-trained journalists, photographers and editors to distill the issues that affect our daily lives and this must start with regional papers, firstly because national newspapers often pick up on local stories, secondly because although we may currently still have some of the best writers and photographers in the world among our national press, there is no longer the training ground and career structure in the regions that will feed into the nationals in generations to come.

I very strongly believe that a lively press is the foundation of real democracy. I believe newspapers could regain some lost ground by investing in their online versions, which are by and large risible, but it’ll take a very courageous chief executive and a great deal of shareholder patience to succeed. Quality, in-depth news coverage requires real human resources and deep pockets. There is no way of doing it on the cheap.

It’s astonishing that in the light of the Leveson enquiry newspapers continue to under-invest in editorial staff. Training is vital to prevent future misadventures, yet many newspapers rely on unpaid interns to make up the shortfall in the newsroom. In terms of photojournalism there will be less scrutiny of those in public office and an increase in incidents of members of the public getting into trouble or hurt when they try to do a professional’s job.

Democracy isn’t cheap and it certainly means more than the ability to take and share photos. Let’s not be distracted with all the cool new stuff we can do while some of the necessary stuff that used to happen takes us into a future where real democracy is devalued, swept aside to make way for the digital revolution.

in Industry Comment 5 comments
 by Tim Gander

Have Camera, Will Travel

Each year I’ll find myself covering one or two long-distance photographic projects in multiple locations around England and Wales for clients who would rather book me and trust they’ll get consistent results than book a series of photographers with a mixture of styles and approaches and find the results are variable, and already this year I’ve popped over to Essex, Norfolk and up to the West Midlands for a client needing photos of care homes for the elderly.

Last year I travelled as far as Newcastle for a client needing images of scientific research, taking in Bristol, Warwick and Leeds on that particular tour. Throw in a few trips to London and that sums up a typical year’s jobs which are “off-patch.”

I quite enjoy traveling, seeing different places and meeting people from all over the country, but my first tour of this year became a bit of a challenge, especially when I found myself in a hotel just outside Birmingham, monitoring increasingly alarming weather forecasts foretelling of several inches of snow.

Police officer directs traffic in blizzard conditions in Bolton.

Still, I’d rather be a photographer than a policeman!

Indeed, it snowed so hard on the Thursday and Friday of that week that I had to book an extra night in my hotel because to try to travel home on the Friday night would have been folly. Drivers in Gloucester and Somerset were becoming trapped and I didn’t fancy joining them.

I had two sites to visit on the Friday, and while I managed to get to the morning one, it being a 10-minute walk down the road, I had to postpone the afternoon site until the following Monday, meaning yet another hotel booking and more miles to cover.

It’s all part of the job though. Even when the weather isn’t being a nuisance, logistics is part of the job of being a photographer; booking places to stay, making sure I set off in good time to make the appointments, adapting when things don’t go to plan, liaising with the client, and I have to say I get some satisfaction from the task of ultimately fulfilling the brief even when there are big challenges.

Ultimately, my job is to get the pictures the client needs with the minimum amount of fuss, and the pictures must fulfill the brief. They can’t be below-standard just because things don’t go smoothly, though last week’s exterior shots of the homes were a bit of a challenge, everything being carpeted in white. Still, it all looked very pretty.

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