Porteous Photography The photo blog of James Porteous

Fourteen days at the coalface – Day One

As I've alluded to on my Flickr pages, a month and a bit ago, I won Best Photographer at the Herald Student Press Awards, netting me a week's work experience as a photographer, and a shiny new Renault Modus (one of those prizes may not actually be true). That one week has since grown into two, and I started today.

For the last few weeks, I've been dossing around, doing photo jobs here and there, but this weekend has been a full-blown photographic arse kicking... just what you need, when you have to start trying to convince your body that 1pm is not an acceptable time to be getting out of bed, and that 9am is going to be the new deal. Negotiations were tough, especially after a couple of days that were particularly miserly on the pillow-time quotient, but I was on time. Hell, I was five minutes early!

No sooner had I swiped "Guest Pass Number 2" over the automated entry to the building, than I was back outside, and in a taxi, bound for a bar in the West End of Glasgow, to get a GV for the Evening Times. At this point, I should comment that if I learn any lingo over the next 14 days, it will go in this blog - GV means General View, and is just a bog standard term for photos of places, as far as I can tell... 3 minutes with a taxi waiting on me, and I was off back to the office to file my images.

Back in the photographers' room, and after a quick edit, it was time to hit the mean streets of Glasgow with a work experience reporter, and a seasoned photographer to make sure I didn't make a hash job of what was to follow. Hunting down the most stylish individuals that Buchanan Street had to offer - slim pickings on a bank holiday morning - I was tasked with shooting the suave individuals in their ensembles, ready for their place in an article where they all had to name their style icons. Simple, full-length body shots, although I wasn't exceptionally happy with images of the first girl I shot... the others were much better.

After that, the job sheet took myself and the experienced photographer across the Clyde, into Govan, where we needed to pick up some Collects (images that papers use that are provided by subjects of stories etc. An example would be when someone dies, and the same photo is used by all of the press. Although obviously they didn't give the papers that image. Because they're dead), and do some shots of the girl in the article. All very quick, all very simple. Other than arriving half an hour to early - allowing some time to wander around the Science Centre and take some photos of Clydeside - everything was fine.

Last job of the day was spent with another photographer, visiting the Southside, and doing some setup shots for use in an article about businesses in the area. This was a little trickier, and is an area of photography that I've never been too confident in - I've never really had to do much in the way of setup shots for news stories, and much prefer to shoot natural images. Anyway, I watched, learned, and acted as a light stand for the photographer I was with, and tried out some images myself. I think my experience of using external flash through mountain bike photography may come in useful, but in a totally different manner (portraiture etc.), as the photographer I was shadowing was using it to great effect.

All in, it was a busy day to start my fortnight with, so it bodes well for what's coming up in the next couple of weeks. I'm aiming to get much more comfortable with this setting-up malarkey, as I it's a big chink in my armour at the moment... nothing that several days of watching the pros doing it won't fix though. One other thing: unless I say otherwise, the images on these pages will be entirely un-edited, aside from cropping/rotating, as I'm trying to see how much I can achieve in-camera, rather than using Capture NX as a crutch.