So it's been a week since the date of the General Election has been announced. With this, the photography for my Final Project of this academic year has gotten under way. In the run up to and including the Election, I'll be following
Ruth Smeeth, the Labour candidate for Burton Upon Trent, hoping to provide a behind the scenes photo-documentary.
This project started sometime before the General Election was announced though. The Final Project is a self initiated piece of work and I already had a few ideas of what I wanted to do. My self imposed prerequisites for this project were to do something with people and to make sure it was something I could really get my teeth into. I soon settled on doing something related to the General Election. To keep it achievable, I decided to focus it purely on
Burton Upon Trent, a town local to me. From there, I wrote a proposal and began a long period of emailing the candidates, at the time those that had announced they would be standing were from the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the BNP. Choosing to ask the BNP was something that I deliberated over for sometime, as I have absolutely no love for them whatsoever. However, this project isn't about my politics and it would provide another aspect to the photos.
Regardless, the BNP didn't bother to reply to me. However,
Andrew Grittiths of the Conservatives did take time to reply to me. Sadly though, after discussing with his campaign team, he declined to take part in the project. Thankfully, Ruth Smeeth from the Labour Party met with me to discuss the project further and agreed to take part. I started photographing the week before the Election announcement. Ever since it's been an ever increasing whirlwind of activity, including conferences, meetings, visits and campaigning. Ruth, her campaign manager, Steve and the rest of the Burton Labour Party team have been very accommodating and supportive of my project. It certainly helps to have built up a trust between us.
I decided to shoot this project digitally. Mostly this makes things a lot easier for me. As I'll be spending a lot of time with the Burton Labour Party, it enables me to work from home afterwards to select images and see how it's going. I'm gravitating towards using prime lenses, typically a 50mm and a 24mm. I prefer the look and feel of the resulting images and it means I sometimes have to get in close to what's going on. I don't want the images to be purely a documentary, they've got to be aesthetically interesting too. This is sometimes a struggle and I have to remain alert at all times and work hard at seeing potential shots. The other issue I have is ensuring the photographs have a distinguishable style, something I can call my own. But I'm sure this is something every photographer faces.
