Home Town Features

One of the regular and routine requirements when you work as a photographer for the army is to provide what the military call 'Home Town Stories' but what I prefer to call 'Home Town Features'. The concept is straight forward really.....Individual X from Town Y is photographed, a brief article is written and then both are sent to their local paper.

This type of piece achieves a number of things...

• The Individual(s) and their efforts are highlighted for their friends, family and others to see, which is of course, a good thing.
• The local paper receives a good quality finished article, free of charge, for them to use in their paper and which can, ultimately, assist in the circulation figures of the paper.
• It raises the wider profile of the military and the 'messages' it tries to put out and can also assist with recruitment.

So everyone is a winner really! Although the first point is by far the most important, the other two are of no consequence to me.

The photographs below are recent examples of some of the pictures I took to accompany some of these HTF articles and all of the individuals pictured gave their permission for their pictures to be used and also to then be sent to their particular regional newspapers for publication and in most of the examples below they have already gone out to their local papers.

In the majority of these examples the type of work each individual does comes through in most of the pictures, or at least the environment in which they work and when all are supported by the relevant copy it provides a quality package to their respective local print media. Where the work carried out by the individual is not immediately known these pictures formed part of a more in depth story about an individual and or subject, in other words, a Feature piece, hence - Home Town Feature.

Some brief techy info for those interested in how these results were achieved...

• Two Nikon D3 DSLR cameras
• Either a 24mm f2.8 or an 85mm f1.4 prime lens was used
• One Nikon SB 900 speedlight
• Flash used off camera, either hand held or placed on a small stand
• Speedlight triggered with an SU 800 unit
• 1/4 CTO gel filter for the speedlight - But not used for all pictures. This helps to warm up the image slightly. Use when appropriate.
• All images were shot in 'Manual' mode on the cameras
• A mixture of manual and TTL was used on the speedlight