I stumbled across this photojournalism workshop by chance, I was looking at the FACT website when I saw a link on the page and discovered a free workshop. I’ve been on paid and free photography courses/workshops etc. before and always found a difference between the two, but today’s was as good as any paid course. The tutor and photographer Adam Lee was enthusiastic and knowledgeable and with a different mix of people in the room, we had some interesting thoughts and discussions. We looked at pathways to disseminate our images, social media, new websites and looked at Cam360 where I was the guinea pig who signed up for this. Outside of the workshop this is something that I will investigate and make use of.
The afternoon was broken into a number of parts, we paired up and looked through a selection of images from Reuters One World Now, picking what we thought was the strongest image and discussed why we felt it was a good image so the usual, colour, composition, story etc. Then we attempted to write a caption for another image we’d chosen, comparing these to ones in the book- obviously ours were much shorter and less descriptive than the correct one. We then had a chance to get out and about to take images, by this point it was after four so getting dark and the light rain turned much heavier while we were out. Not everyone had cameras but we managed to get some shots and once back inside the warmth of the studio, we worked in pairs again to write captions for chosen images, and whether it captured the photographers opinion and feelings of Liverpool.
Moving on from this we discussed tagging and tips on how to choose these effectively, then the last part of the day was on consent and permission. As usual with this topic there are some grey areas and some confusion. Interestly enough I’d used the cleaning cloth supplied by Amateur Photographer with photographers rights all over one side of it to dry off my soggy camera. This added to the debate of photography in a public and private place as the wording on there was approved by the home office.
Things I learnt
– Street photography in the UK and Liverpool is tricky before you even consider getting a consent form completed.
– If the photograph tells the story- don’t necessarily need to include a really long caption
– Captions are a mix of some of the visual things going on within the image and also describes the things that you can’t see
– Tags- take some of these from the caption
– Tags- consider the feelings that the image evokes, put these into tags
– Tags- put your name into tags so the images can be linked back to you
– Consent- don’t need adult consent if the image is not for profit
– Consent- consider getting video consent if an event where it’s not feasible to use paper forms
Saltwick Studios Photography 