Assignment One: Local Communities.

Assignment One.

Local Communities.

The brief was to produce ten images demonstrating my engagement with the lives of people in my community. 

In 2014 The Telegraph named Deal High Street as The High Street of the Year.  Deal High Street is unique in that it mainly contains privately owned shops.  These are the shops we use every day and we were justly proud of this award. 

Add to this lively high street three weekly markets and a monthly farmer's market and we are well served without recourse to supermarkets.

My plan was to feature some of the people I do business with on a daily basis and photograph them within, or outside their shops and stalls.  I have tried to show them as we see them.  The three men in the bar Bloody Mary’s are always laughing and their bar reflects this, the man outside the hardware shop invariably has a look of suspicion about him while the mad hatter at the market stall, who sells everything from old clocks and silver through to tools and toilet rolls is the archetypical market trader.

This was one of a number of ideas I looked at.  Another was the shrinking beach fishing fleet but found that it had all but died already and there was insufficient in for ten useful images. A third was the lively music scene but ran across the problem of light, or rather the lack of it.  The use of flash in a pub is rarely welcome. 

It was important for me to show these guys in their environments and to highlight the independent shops of Deal.

Technical:- Camera an Olympus E330 with a 25mm fixed focal length lens (50 mm equivalent).  Images presented as taken without cropping.  Exposure and colour correcting carried out in Photoshop.

  

The images.

Where everybody knows your name.

The Mad Hatter.

Just ask.

Black Pig.

No Name Bakers.

Women in red.

David.  Glazier at John Corley Glass.

Heath food.

Are you being served?

Best fish in Deal.

Reflections.

The brief was to produce ten images demonstrating how I interact with my community.  Deal is a small community so the interactions are not going to be on a grand scale.  The largest section of people I interact with are the towns shop keepers so it was this group I chose to photograph.  

The images I have produced represent this group well and I am pleased with the result.  I have lived in Deal for less than four years, having moved down on my retirement, but now feel like a local.