Two proud front pages

I've got a couple of front pages today — nothing new there, ha! — but these ones are extra sweet because of the effort involved in producing the pictures.

This picture for the Ross-shire Journal had the potential to be very boring, with a couple of guys from ScotRail coming to look at some war murals at Invergordon train station. So I decided to take a gamble and not feature the war murals at all, instead going for this quirky shot of them queueing at a painted-on ticket office. Now of course I then did some safe shots featuring the war murals, but I thought this was the best picture and thankfully the editor agreed so it's now beaming out at people from hundreds of newsstands around Ross-shire.

Some of the alternative frames:

And this one on the front of today's P&J was done in challenging circumstances, to put it politely. The lady in the picture didn't want to do anything unusual or interesting, and I was very limited in how much I could move the stone around, so backgrounds were a serious problem. I tried a few weird angles and then just kept plugging away until she got bored and relaxed a bit, at which point I got this frame. Not perfect, but better than I was expecting.

Alternative frames, shot from above to use the floor as a background. The over-the-shoulder shot was a good idea that I'll recycle at some point in future.