I went to Carlisle today to take some formal portraits of some residents of a Gypsy site for my Rethink project. This was the first time I’ve used my white backdrop and I’m not that experienced with lighting, so there are definitely things which leap out to me already which I could have done better. Nevertheless it was a valuable learning experience and I’m pleased with what I’ve come back with, which with a little basic editing should be ok. Each person chose what they wanted to wear and the postures to be photographed in. I then showed the resulting portraits to each subject on my laptop as we went along, and they told me which they wanted me to use in the project. I asked each of them one basic question, which will form the basis of the photo captions. It’s nice to finally have a backbone for the project, after what feels like months of thrashing around in a state of panic and frustration. I will be going down some other avenues with this in the weeks to come, but this is a cracking start. Huge thanks go to my friends Joe and Jane Ann for helping me out with this.