I’ve been in beautiful Istanbul for three days and I’ve only taken about 20 photos so far…

I’m here for the Foundry photojournalism workshop, which starts tomorrow, and have been scratching around trying to set up a story to shoot over the coming week. I want to cover something journalistic of course and something relevant to my areas of expertise but the language barrier is significant here and is making life difficult for everyone at this point.

Today I did a little bit of sightseeing but the place is seriously heaving with tourists. In any case, the more I use photography for journalism, the less interested I become in shooting single images for their own sake. I just can’t get motivated any more to be the scattergun style snapper that I used to be…sparing is probably better though.

Although I love travelling and have enjoyed occasional work trips abroad over the past few years, I’m starting to appreciate that I’m more cut out for working in the UK. I’ve recently learned to appreciate that one of my strengths is getting close to people over a period of time, earning trust and learning a lot about their situations.

That is difficult when you need to rely on an interpreter (and they aren’t always so convincing) or when you actually can’t communicate directly with the people at all. It’s putting me right out of my comfort zone and inevitably means that whatever will come out of it will unfortunately lack the depth that in a perfect world I’d like to achieve. Then again there are of course limits to what is possible for anyone to achieve in a week.

Fingers crossed it’ll all come together.