by Tim Gander

Documenting Challenging Times

On The Vaccination Trail

Regular readers will be aware of my recent work covering the vaccination programme in Wiltshire. I’d like to dedicate this post to all the hard-working front line staff who are the reason the vaccination rollout has been such a huge success.

I blogged previously about the initial coverage of the walk-in vaccination service at Bath Racecourse, but since then I’ve visited a mobile service on a bus, a school vaccination day and most recently, a session on a narrow boat.

The client, NHS BANES, Swindon & Wiltshire CCG (BSWCCG), use the images for social media promotion of the vaccination programme as well as for external stakeholder communications and reports. However, the images are more than just PR. They’re an historical record of the regional effort to control Covid-19 and its effects.

A Client With Vision

Perhaps 20 years ago such a huge national effort would have been covered more widely and in greater depth by the regional and local press, but they are largely absent from from the scene. With few (I suspect now the number is 0) industry-trained photographers covering local news events anymore, there’s a vacuum of photographic coverage of important regional stories.

This is a shame, but I’m thrilled to be able to help document what is undoubtedly a critical moment.

While BSWCCG is not a media company, their communications team have recognised the need for photography not only as a promotional tool, but also as a means to document the clinical effort within the pandemic. And though I’m no Dorothea Lange, this exercise echos that need to record a critical issue to raise awareness.

A young man is seen receiving his vaccine. We can only see the man, who is wearing a mask, and the arms of the nurse administering the vaccine.
August 2021 - Bath Racecourse.
A college student receives her Covid vaccination on board a bus.
September 2021 - Wiltshire College.
A school pupil in his school sports hall is vaccinated by a nurse.
November 2021 - Clarendon School, Trowbridge.
A blonde nurse bends to vaccinate a female patient on board a narrow boat.
A Covid 19 vaccination is administered on a narrowboat on the Kennet and Avon canal.

My Approach

Not all of my images are strictly fly-on-the-wall photo-documentary, though I do strive to capture what I witness with as much honesty and integrity as if I was still a staff news photographer.

For example, at Clarendon Academy, the two pupils I had permission to photograph had recently come out of self-isolation after contracting Covid-19. This meant they were unable to have their boosters on the day, so I posed those shots with empty syringes (and they were captioned as posed). However the images of the nurse at the dilution station were all taken as she did her work. Nothing staged, pure documentary.

Meanwhile for the narrow boat visit, as for the Bath Racecourse and Lackham College sessions, the vaccinations were real and I had to get my shots live. I couldn’t ask a nurse to hold a position or pose while I got set up – I couldn’t interrupt the process of administering an injection.

This makes for some challenging moments. In particular, in the cramped confines of a narrow boat I had to be very aware of my surroundings. Hats off to the staff who had to work in there all day; I kept my time on board to a minimum.

Regardless of any challenges, I have to go in with a calm, professional attitude. Being jittery about camera settings, working in the rain, with difficult light, or stressing about working in a mask will transmit to those I need to work with, and they’ll react negatively and rightly so. They have a job to do and protocols to follow, they don’t need a clown in the room.

Clinical nurses at tables in a school gymnasium with blue walls prepare to vaccinate school pupils in Trowbridge.
Setting up in a school sports hall.
Nurses at tables in a school sports hall prepare syringes with vaccine prior to administering the injections.
Preparing syringes in a school sports hall used as a vaccination centre in Trowbridge, Wiltshire.
A nurse in mask and apron dilutes a vial of Pfizer vaccine by turning it in her fingers 10 times.
Mixing vaccine.
A registered nurse holds up a vial of vaccine to the light to check it is still clear and good to use.
Checking the vaccine.

Thank You

So I want to say a big thank you to NHS BANES, Swindon & Wiltshire CCG for commissioning me. I value my involvement in this effort and if there is more to come, I’ll relish the opportunity to play my small part. Also to the administrative staff who’ve been so helpful and in particular to all the registered nurses who, while being utterly professional in their work, have accommodated me in mine.

Thank you.

And Finally

This is probably my final post for the year. I’ll be back in January, kicking off with a look back at 2021 and a look forward at 2022. So have a great and safe Christmas and New Year and I’ll see you again soon. Thanks for staying loyal through 2021.

Tim

in Case Studies 2 comments
 by Tim Gander

2020 and BEYOND!

Often at the close of a year I’ll put together an annual review, but 2019 was different in that it was the close of a decade.

So why didn’t I do a review of the decade? Simply put, I ran out of time. After three months of Bunker conversion, the end-rush to get it ready to coincide with the looming termination date of my tenancy at The Old Church School (eight years there!) PLUS client work PLUS admin PLUS Christmas, I had to make some harsh decisions about what I could and could not fit in.

In fact I was so busy, it barely sank in until quite late in December that we were in fact staring down the barrel of the 2020s. By the time I’d twigged, it was too late to put anything meaningful together. Sorry about that.

However, I’m now fully set up in the new space and although it’s early days, so far it’s working very well and I’m proud of what I accomplished in renovating what was a tatty-looking concrete structure, turning it into a genuinely usable, some may say attractive, workspace. I’m particularly chuffed that the only part of the project I didn’t tackle was the electrical installation. I may be insane, but I’m not mad! My general DIY skills have definitely improved with this project though, just don’t ask me to convert your shed/bunker/garage for you.

Returning to the subject of the turn of the decade, perhaps it’s a shame I didn’t get to look back and reflect, but I actually feel more in the mood for looking forward. After all, my photography of ten years ago is nothing like the work I’m doing now, and even further removed from where I want to take it in the coming years.

Through this year and the next few years, I’ll be working hard to build the fine art projects and prints side of my business (takeagander.co.uk) while continuing to invest in my corporate work, which still represents the bulk of my business.

The launch (see previous post) of the open air exhibition of panels from What Happened Here was a great end to the year and an indicator of the kind of outcome I’m looking for with my personal work – getting it out there and noticed and looking for new opportunities to shoot fresh work and see where it takes me.

Black and white view of an upturned large metal can with dirty rags strewn nearby.
The Saxonvale project 'What Happened Here' continues to grow.

With the corporate work I will of course keep developing my style, skills and services, but this relies in part on the personal projects which help me develop new practices outside of client time; I don’t believe in using my clients as guinea pigs for experiments.

What I’m aiming for is more of the same as in recent years, only bigger and better; my corporate work feeding my ability to shoot personal projects, with income from fine art prints and other uses of that work building up into it’s own sizeable income. I have plans, some vaguer than others, but plans nonetheless.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sign off now and start putting those plans into practice. In the meantime, do watch this space for news on forthcoming deals on fine art prints – I hope to announce something big soon.

in My News / Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

On The Mount

Tip: To see the image in full width, click the title of this post to lose the sidebar.

A bit of a change of direction this week; I recently started something which I hope will become a coherent series of photos journaling the real Frome town. I want to include the people and the places that get less of a look-in, which are often ignored for not being pretty enough, retro enough or chic enough for our attention. Like Standerwick, I want this series to inform the viewer without pushing an agenda. You see the pictures, you decide what they mean to you.

I don’t want this to be just another series of “petty observations” the like of which you see on Instagram or twitter every day. Certainly Frome gets its share of those with many snaps of Catherine Hill and Cheap Street, or the Independent Market. I’m looking for the slightly grittier side of Frome.

The image below is just the first instalment, a bit of a scene-setter if you like, and it shows The Mount, Keyford, Frome, which is just one of the areas I’ll be chronicling. This series will eventually get its own gallery on my website and perhaps become an exhibition somewhere in the town. Well, that would be super, but we’ll have to see about that.

In the meantime, here goes nothing, as they say…

Feltham Drive looking towards Austin Close, The Mount, Frome, Somerset

Feltham Drive looking towards Austin Close, The Mount, Frome, Somerset

in Personal Work 0 comments
 by Tim Gander

Entering The Press Photography Dark Ages

Bizarrely, having written in my last blog post about the Pine Range fire which I covered for The Bath Chronicle in 1991, I was heading back to my flat from a family gathering on Sunday evening to discover the sheltered housing complex on the opposite side of my building from where Pine Range once stood was surrounded by fire crews, engines and hoses. A fire had broken out in one of the flats and 11 residents had to be evacuated, with one resident being taken to hospital suffering smoke inhalation.

Aside from the obvious concern that everyone had been evacuated safely I couldn’t help feeling I should take a few photos, in spite of the fact I had a fair number of other commitments that evening, limited time and no obvious client for any photos I would take.

But the news photographer blood which still courses through me was buzzing and telling me to get on with it and at least take a few frames to offer up to the local paper. More in hope than expectation; time was a paper would have torn my arm off at the elbow for a set of pictures from an event they couldn’t get to and would happily have paid for them. Times have changed so very much though.

Fire crews attend a fire at Gorehedge residential home for the elderly in Keyford, Frome.

A general view gives some idea of the scale of the operation

I don’t often find myself covering this kind of story any more. Most of what I do for publications is press release work, which of course doesn’t include things like un-planned fires. I had to pause and ask myself if it was still valid for me to take pictures at an incident if I don’t have an immediate client for the shots. I don’t even carry a National Union of Journalists card any more, having let my membership lapse some years ago.

I honestly don’t think any of that matters though. Whether or not a newspaper wants to use my photos is entirely their call. As a trained, experienced news photographer I still feel I have a duty to record events if I am able. I can’t know at the time of taking a photo whether I will have captured something banal, tragic or incredibly newsworthy. All I can do is call on all my training and experience and get on with taking pictures.

Now that local newspapers no longer cover local stories and events with anything approaching enthusiasm perhaps it’s more important than ever that photographers with the right training and skills create quality visual records of what they witness.

Firefighters work through the building to ensure there are no pockets of fire left

Firefighters work through the building to ensure there are no pockets of fire left

Looking at the paltry photographic coverage the Bath Chronicle gave the Tour of Britain last week, and The Frome Standard’s belated attempt at photographing a major news event on their own doorstep (their photos were taken over three hours after the event), it’s possible that historians of the future will look back on the stories of our time and wonder why the photos from the early 2000s are worse than the ones taken a century before on far more primitive equipment.

Crews start to wind-down as the incident de-escalates

Crews start to wind-down as the incident de-escalates

 

 

in Case Studies / Industry Comment / Personal Work 6 comments
 by Tim Gander

Need a press photographer?

children carrying yellow pages

Names (left to right) and reason for the photo are essential IPTC information.

Don’t go looking through the plumbers section of the Yellow Pages then.

Well, that’s an easy lesson to remember, but where it gets trickier is when you search for a press photographer and you come across dozens of on-line listings for photographers who claim to do press work, but have no experience or training in the field whatsoever.

Some will be primarily wedding photographers, others will be studio and portrait photographers, but the question to ask is, “do they have a press background?” This is easily checked because they should be able to tell you where they trained and which paper or agency trained them.

You might just want a photographer to cover an event for you for PR or to set up some one-off PR images, but unless the photographer actually knows what local, regional, national or even trade press want, you could be wasting your time and money.

It isn’t just about style either. Many wedding photographers talk of offering “reportage style” photography in their wedding packages, but that’s not the same as newspaper or reportage coverage of an event destined for a journalist’s in-box.

One common error amongst the un-trained photographers doing press work is to forget to take suitable captions to go with the photo, so the desk won’t know who is in the photo, which names belong to which faces, where the event happened, why it happened… everything the desk needs to be able to use the photo.

Non-press photographers aren’t au fait with things like technical requirements either. File size is a big bugbear of many journalists as they’re either sent files which are far too small to be publishable, or the files are so huge they crash the paper’s entire email system. Not a good way to win positive press coverage.

Sometimes using someone not familiar with press best practices or even trained in relevant areas of law (as all trained photo-journalists are) can be downright foolhardy. Sometimes photographers need to know the law in order to be able to stand their ground and get the job done in the face of a belligerent jobsworth, and other times they need to know what the limits of legality are in order to avoid committing an offence. You don’t want your PR job to miss deadline because the photographer has stepped out of line and ended up in the back of a police van. You equally don’t want your published PR photo to land you in trouble over some inadvertent defamation. This too could backfire into very negative PR.

It’s a simple message this week. Press photography is a distinct and separate discipline, and not best carried out by just anyone with a camera. You’re spending money on PR, so spend it wisely and get great results, safely.

in Advice 4 comments