Jane Pennington's portraits

These are the pictures I took of the lady who writes the press releases for the camera club.  She has a good imagination when it comes to describing activities and competition winners and has a very steady hand to get pin sharp images in her own images.  Jane supports the social secretary when it comes to suggesting and organising days outing and ad-hoc trips.

Jane's favourite image

Having shown Jane what I considered the best three images of our session at the local Heritage Centre I was surprised when she chose the image above showing her in the unrestored paint store at the back of the site.  What she liked about this picture was how she was standing looking around and raising her hands in despair and hope at all the work that would have to go into transforming this derelict store into a tea room.

My favourite image

I liked this image as it showed her climbing the shelves to look at the back to see what was in the boxes.  She looked interested in exploring the store room and discovering exhibits that could be used in future displays.  Jane explained that even though on each of the boxes there was written what should have been in each box, it was not necessarily so.  The volunteers and staff had a bad habit of looking in the boxes and removing items already listed or adding extra items if there was extra space in the box but then not noting it down on the contents list.

The third image I chose was the one below.

I liked this image because it showed a caring side to Jane's nature.  That probably sounds weird about a plaster boy and collecting box, but it was just the way Jane was holding it that was caring.

The whole shoot was fairly difficult as it took place in old buildings or store cupboards which had very poor lighting.  Add to the fact that I had turned my on camera flash to reduce the output so that I didn't get heavy black shadows behind the subject meant that whole areas were quite dark.

It was quite difficult to get into different positions for shooting pictures as the areas were so full of boxes, packages and equipment.  I would have liked to get round the other side of this 'boy' and shoot away from the windows but it was impossible as it was surrounded by parcels and wrapped stuff.

Jane is very committed to both the camera club and the heritage centre where she has been volunteering for about 12 months.  The area she enjoys investigating and organising is that containing old prints and photographs of Axminster.  As Axminster is a very old town, recorded as early as the 9th century, there's plenty of historical pictures of the town since photography began.