Creating a New Challenge

All photographers need inspiration. A little while back, at the recommendation of fellow snapper Christine Willis, I joined the Extreme Challenge Mania group on Flickr, a small group of photographers looking to each other for inspiration by setting a weekly theme to use as a brief. The themes are set by the members, and each week there's a new topic to draw inspiration from.

This week, I decided to put my neck out and make a suggestion, and I put forward the idea of "Professional Portraits". The notion was to go and shoot a portrait shot of someone, and from the shot it should be apparent what that person does for a living. The theme has had a couple of people taking a stab at it, myself included, and I started out by shooting one of my work colleagues Chris Leese, whilst we were setting up our Shoot Studio for an upcoming Open Day event.



After shooting Chris (so to speak), I decided to venture a little further away from the office in search of people who could be readily identified in a shot in terms of their profession, and it didn't take me too long to find a couple of willing subjects:




Many thanks to Anup, one of the baristas in the Squeeze Box Juice Bar, and to PC Keith Emery for allowing me to capture their likenesses.

Both of these fine gentlemen were found within fifty metres of my office at work, so I guess that the message I'm trying to put out there is that sometimes you can find inspiration closer than you'd think!

My Flickr album can be found here - thanks for looking!