Assignment One - First Shoot

In planning for assignment one, I looked at the various aspects of my own local community that I could document in photographs. My town, although not generally well-known, is famous for its long history of lock-making. I decided to use this as the theme for my assignment, and began brainstorming some general ideas of the kind of images I could capture. I identified various elements in the town that provide evidence of its history in this industry, such as:

1. A Morrisons supermarket, built on the site of the former Yale lock factory.
2. A housing development, built on the site of another lock factory.
3. A lock-makers memorial.
4. Key-shaped signage in the town.
5. Businesses still producing locks and keys.

With regards to point (5) above, I considered approaching a company that produces locks in the town, with a view to getting their insight into the industry, and taking photographs of their working environment. I liked this idea, but found it very daunting; cold-calling a stranger to ask them to show me their premises and allow me to photograph it is certainly against my normal instincts. However, convinced it would be of great value to the assignment, I emailed a local family company. I chose this particular company as they had been in the lock business in the town for 100 years, and had several generations working at the business.

The company, A. Lewis and Sons (Willenhall), were very quick to reply, and told me that it would be no problem for me to visit. A few days later I called and spoke to Terry Lewis, who had over 50 years experience in the business, and whose son now runs it. We arranged a day and time for me to go along, and I did so the following week. Terry was extremely helpful and knowledgeable, generously giving me around 2 hours of his time and recollections.

The assignment requires that a single focal-length is used for all images. My 50mm prime lens is ideal, as it means I don't have to tape the barrel, and having a fast lens was useful in the lock factory, as it was a very dimly-lit environment. This ultimately provided a different problem though; shooting at f1.8 in order to enable a lower ISO meant that depth of field was severely limited. Once back in Lightroom, I found this was detrimental to several of the images. In hindsight, if I had thought of it at the time I could have easily taken several images of each subject, and focus-stacked them in Photoshop.

Before the visit, I had contacted my tutor to obtain his thoughts on my idea. He said it was certainly something I could run with, and gave me the idea of using the locker-maker to bind the various elements that I wanted to photograph together, perhaps using hand-written notes to accompany the images. My current thoughts are to assemble the 10 images for assignment, then to post the prints to Terry, asking if he wouldn't mind writing a personally-relevant sentence or two about each one, on a post-it note. I could then present my images in a book format, with each image on the left, with the scanned post-it note from Terry on the facing page. For now though, I need to begin planning the rest of the images.