I love doing photos for the Press & Journal. I like doing the sort of photos that I see in the paper, and the photo editors seem to like the photos that I do, so I know we're on the same wavelength.

You won't hear one word of complaint from me about the photos I'm asked to do for the local papers. Some photographers hate doing pics of kids, award winners, cheque presentations, etc, and I'll admit that I don't find those pics particularly interesting to do, but work is work and I always appreciate every job I'm given. Without the support and encouragement of various people at the Ross-shire Journal, the North Star, the John O'Groat Journal and the Northern Times, this wannabe news photog wouldn't have a career. Simple as that.

But it's just a fact that P&J jobs are more challenging, they give me more scope for creativity, and they're more fun because of the time pressure: Phone call in the morning, job in the afternoon, early evening deadline, then the pic's in the paper the next day and that's the end of it.

The last couple of jobs I've done have been right up my street. The first one required a photo of three people in front of a large housing development in a picturesque town square. There is a great deal of local opposition to the development and the three people were representative of the community council and local business.

If you've seen photos like this but never tried doing them then you won't appreciate how difficult they are, and if you're one of those über-photogs who can do them intuitively then I'm jealous of you! I find them very challenging. But I thought this one turned out well, thanks largely to the co-operation of the three guys who let me experiment for around 20 minutes. This was one of the very last frames:

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Of course there were lots of lousy shots before that one, but a few that were okay. For anyone who is interested I've uploaded the entire shoot to Flickr with all of the raw photos, unedited and unprocessed, so you can see how the shoot developed. Here's the rest of the selection that I gave the paper:

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This other job started with a bizarre coincidence…

A couple of weeks ago I was heading in to town on the bus for a driving lesson. A woman got off the bus at the same time as me and we got chatting for a while, mostly about how horrible it is to have to travel everywhere by bus. The next week I met her again and we got chatting again.

Tuesday of this week, I get a phone call asking me to go and do a photo of a woman who rang the paper to complain about having to wait in the cold because the buses often don't run, or run late. I called the woman to arrange a time for the photo, and I recognised her voice. Same woman!

Small world eh?

Here's the photo that was in the paper, complete with the shadow of my radio trigger. I spotted the shadow at the time and avoided it in other shots, but none of them had the same impact as this one so this is the one that ran. I don't think many people would recognise it, apart from camera geeks.
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Again the whole shoot can be viewed on Flickr, unedited and unprocessed, and here are the other shots that the paper had to choose from. All of these were lit with flash, positioned around 45-degrees off-axis, but hopefully it isn't obvious, apart from the woman's shadow in the last one.

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Note that for both shoots I gave the paper a selection of horizontal and vertical frames. Always a good idea. Options, options, options.