IT’S BACK!

After all the grief and uncertainty of the past 15 months, it was a genuine pleasure to be back photographing the SOE Skills Challenge at S&B Automotive Academy in Bristol last week.

There were all manner of Covid securities in place, including testing of all participants and support colleagues (myself included), mask-wearing, cleaning and social distancing.

My Role

Regular readers will have seen me write about this before, but of course last year’s event was cancelled. This year was my 6th Skills Challenge and while it’s become familiar photographic territory for me, each year I try to bring something new to the coverage.

One of my tasks during testing week is to supply “rush” images for the PR team to use for social media posts and updates during the event. I’ll usually choose a selection of the morning’s images and supply these ready-formatted for easy upload to Twitter, Facebook and so on.

Bringing Something New

This year, in addition to those rushes, I decided to deploy my 360 camera so people could get a better sense of the environment and context of the event even while it was happening.

As a result of the interactive 360 panoramas, SOE’s Facebook posts achieved far greater engagement than had been seen previously. For Twitter, the regular still images were perfect (Twitter can’t display 360s properly unless there’s something I’ve missed!)

I don’t have access to SOE’s social media statistics, but my contact was astonished to see how much more widely the posts were liked, shared and commented on compared with previous years. Much of this will have been down to the more immersive 360 images like this one:

As I say, I also supplied regular stills to support the social media posts and of course I’ve since edited and supplied the high-resolution files for SOE’s web and print publications. The images will also be used at the awards ceremony in September, which I’m looking forward to covering too.

Shining A Light on Vital Workers

What I love about this event is how it brings a focus to skilled technicians whose work is vital, yet rarely seen or acknowledged. Next time you’re on a bus or coach, or see one going about its duties on Britain’s roads, you know it’s there and working because of the skills and dedication of engineers, many of whom work unsociable hours to keep our public transport running smoothly.

Next Year?

So now I have a little under 12 months to think about what I will bring next year to keep my coverage fresh and evolving. It might be a change of approach or technique, but I already have a couple of ideas. I guess you’ll just have to watch this space to find out!

The Beat Goes On

While the news seems unrelentingly gloomy at the moment, I’m pleased to say I’ve had some positives to focus on.

I’ve had bits of work in the last couple of weeks and enquiries have also increased. People are looking to promote their businesses once again!

This doesn’t mean a flood of work is about to engulf me, but it’s encouraging to know I still have clients. I also have some great supporters helping me via my ko-fi account*. They’re keeping me funded for the non-client projects I’m engaged in. *HINT: You can do the same from as little as £3.00 one-off payment!

What is especially encouraging is that in an atmosphere of debate about what counts as a viable job, my job – the job I love, which has been put under this particular spotlight for many years now, continues to be considered viable; invaluable, even.

There are many out there who believe professional photography is dead and that every photo ever needed has been taken already. And if it doesn’t already exist, well there’s always that professional photographer in your pocket. They are, of course, quite wrong.

We know automation and technology cannot replace certain needs. Technology still can’t make a decent loaf of bread, so we can’t expect it to make pictures with the right tone and impact. This only comes about through human interaction.

Try to imagine a world without human interaction, how much fun would that be? How creative? We’re experiencing a taste of it now, so we know the answer already.

So while there will be some very difficult times ahead, I’m going to stay focussed and positive. No one is telling me I’m not viable.

2019?

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a peaceful Christmas and an enjoyable New Year.

I’m starting 2019 with an apology; normally by mid December I’d have posted a round-up of my year, but between shooting and delivering pictures for clients, getting my quarterly VAT return finalised (an annual Christmas joy for me) and having to lose my laptop for a week while a replacement battery was fitted, I just ran out of time. So yes, sorry about that. I know you were all looking forward to that.

To make up for this I’m going to post some thoughts on the year just gone and the year to come, because while I’m looking forward to some interesting commissions and new personal projects, I’m also raring to get going on the next stage of the Saxonvale project on its journey to becoming a book. Heaven knows if that will get finished this year, but I’m determined to make serious headway.

2018 got off to a pretty exciting start. I posted an article on Petapixel about my motivation for shooting film again. The response to that was pretty astonishing and led to me being interviewed by Bill Manning for the Studio C-41 podcast; the first time I’ve been cast in a pod! That generated further interest and I’ve been following the podcast ever since.

If you’re not already aware, Studio C-41 is a podcast (now also a vlog on YouTube) all about film, its resurgence, the cameras, film manufacturers and so on. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, this podcast has gone from strength to strength and has interviewed some of the most important names in film photography today (yours truly excepted). If you’re into C-41 (or E6 or black and white), check out C-41 on any of the links above.

It’s also going to be an interesting year for photography in other ways. I see Matt Smith (the actor formerly known as Dr Who) is playing Robert Mapplethorpe in a new film which I believe is being released in the USA this year. That should be interesting and probably eye-boggling, but I’m also wondering what’s happening with the biopic of Don McCullin, reported to be played by Tom Hardy, which was press-released in 2016. Hopefully we’ll hear more on that this year.

In January 2018 I was pleased to be able to make the launch of Niall McDiarmid’s Town to Town exhibition at the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. I’m slightly in awe of Niall’s street portraits, and really thrilled that the MPF has been set up in Bristol, so finally there is a quality gallery and photographic resource not based in London.

This year I’m really hoping I can get along to a few more exhibitions at the Martin Parr Foundation and further afield. There really is nothing like getting to see photographs in the real world as opposed to online.

And in between all my corporate communications work, I’ll be beavering away on those personal projects which you’ll see slowly revealing (unraveling?) on Instagram. I’ve started Unsigned (see my Instagram), a series of images of torn-off posters, stickers and street signage which creates inadvertent art. I have no idea how long or big this project will get, but I feel it’s only just started. Rather like 2019, except I have a fair idea how long that will be, just no idea how big.

Is your photographer GDPReady?

With the Facebook data scandal still simmering in the headlines, most people will assume that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which comes into effect on May 25th only applies to large organisations, but it also affects a great many photographers. In particular it impacts on those, like me, who regularly photograph people for business websites, press releases, social media and so on.

In a rather large nutshell, anyone who handles data has to get their house in order and register with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) before the deadline or face sanctions. I’ve registered, paid the annual fee, and I’m going through the data I have to ensure it’s secure and compliant.

What this largely means for me is that I need to work through my client galleries removing old ones or ensuring they’re not accessible to anyone except the client. I also need to make updates to my website to ensure people have an understanding of what GDPR means in relation to my work and how I handle their data.

Some galleries are publicly shared because I’ve been asked to make them so, but even then I’ll be looking at closing access to the oldest ones. All this is going to take some time as I’ve been running the system for many years now, but as I add more client work to the delivery system I’ll be making sure it’s only visible to those who need to see it. The only exception to this will be where the person I’ve photographed has given permission for me to allow their images to be searchable.

There is a slight conflict around all this in that as a photographer I should have the right to use my work to promote myself, otherwise clients needing my services won’t be able to find me, but I have to balance this with keeping and handling personal data (a face coupled with a name and place of work for example) in a responsible manner.

There are ways of making all this work, but it’s going to take more than a few weeks to really hone it. Thankfully, for the most part, my entire back catalogue of digital work dating back 18 years isn’t stored online or I think I’d have a mental breakdown at the enormity of the task. While I use cloud storage to deliver images to clients and to allow them to have an online database of the images I’ve shot for them, all my original work is backed up to off-line hard drives which keeps them secure from a data breach point of view.

The other good news is that the personal work I undertake, such as the current Saxonvale project, falls under the artistic exemption of GDPR. Of course this doesn’t mean I can be slap-dash with peoples’ personal data, but because of its nature it’s less prone to result in either a complaint or an investigation by the ICO.

Even so, I have taken images for that project which will only ever see light of day in print form because they’re too sensitive to be shared online, and that raises an interesting question about the future of photography; will we find the internet a less useful space for getting important stories out if there’s a risk of a data breach in publishing online?

Only with a few judgements behind us on data breach cases will we build a true picture of what is or is not a breach of GDPR because it’s not entirely clear from the regulation text itself given the multitude of potential scenarios. In the meantime, I’ll do all I can to keep within the rules.

To be honest, it’s mostly just common sense and courtesy and of course you’ll want to make sure any photographer you work with is compliant. Well now you know of at least one photographer who is working towards that goal.