Faces of Business, The Lower Derwent Valley.

The local communities of the Lower Derwent Valley have always intrigued me, especially the small local businesses. I have always admired how they are still doing business and competing with the large supermarkets that have inevitably moved into the towns. This spurred on my interest with this project, how the business owners put so much time and effort into their business and the close-knit community they create, a community which I feel is often overlooked by locals.

I've been working with the Derwent WISE heritage lottery bid, which aims to restore habitats and promote public and community engagement amongst a long list of other things. To find out all the details please visit the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust page about the bid.

As part of this project I've photographed various small local business owner and workers from around the area. I've looked into how the businesses have grown and changed over the years, and how the community’s perception of these businesses has changed.

I’ve found this a rewarding photographic experience, speaking to the local business owners and hearing their experience and views on the current economic climate was very interesting. I hope this is evident within my images, I aspire that you will see these images and think of how the owners have successfully run their business for the past 10 or even 30 years, and how they will hopefully still be such a large part of their community in the future.

Hope & Social, August Actually and Lonely Robot - The Vic Inn, Derby.

On Wednesday (14th) I headed The Vic Inn, Derby, to photograph Hope & Social for Louder Than War and Noble and Wild. I also photographed my friend playing as his stage name Lonely Robot, and Nottingham band August Actually. I'd listened to some of Hope & Social's music before, and was really impressed. But this was nothing on their live show!

The 9 band members squeezed onto the small stage. with their large variety of instruments, the crowd closed in and the scene was set. Starting with a very quite acoustic song, lead singer Simon got the crowd wanting more, and for the next hour, the songs were cleverly merged with little interludes and jokes, always keeping the crowd intrigued and entertained.

At one point near the end of the set, lead singer Simon start strumming his guitar and walks into the dark crowd and starts singing Looking for Answers (personally my favourite song) in his very unique and slightly eerie voice. As the song goes on he gets the crowd to sing along. Writing this now, I can only play this over and over in my head, it was just a perfect moment in an amazing gig!

Anyway, without further ado, here are the images from the night.

Lonely Robot

August Actually

Hope & Social

 Have you seen Hope & Social, August Actually or Lonely Robot live? what did you think?

ALL rights reserved – do not use these images without written permission from the copyright owner.

Cheers, Lawrence

Faces of business, the Lower Derwent Valley.

You may have seen me talking about a large project I'm slowly bring together. So to give you a small idea of what i'm doing I thought I'd write a quick post.

I'm currently working with the Derwent WISE heritage lottery bid, which aims to restore habitats and promote public and community engagement amongst a long list of other things. To find out all the details please visit the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust page about the bid.

As part of this project I'm photographing various small local business owner and workers from around the area. I'm looking into how the businesses have grown and changed over the years, how the communities perception of these businesses has changed and also how photography as a medium has changed and can now represent these businesses in a modern light. (mind the pun)

I hope that the series of images I create will put emphasis on the fact that in today's current economic climate, more than ever its about the business owner and their stratagy, than their shop front and location.

Here's one of my first images from the project. This is Renate Truin, she has run Bridge Street Furniture, in Belper, along with her son Simon for the last 15 years.

  

Would you be interested in being part of my project? Would you like me to photograph your business? Or maybe you'd just like to talk to me about what I'm doing? If so please get in touch with me via the 'Email Lawrence' section at the bottom of the page or via the Contact page on my website.

Parkhouse hill, Derbyshire

Firstly I'd like to start with an update, I've not been posting many images lately, especially portraits. But I'm currently in the middle of organising a large project, so hopefully in the coming weeks I'll be able to post some images from this collection. 

Now, to the main topic of this post... Yesterday, Sunday 14th, I headed up to Parkhouse hill, near Buxton in the Peaks, with some friends. It was an early dawn shoot, with the alarm set for 5.15. But it was definitely worth it, it was a beautifully crisp cold morning with mist just sitting in the valley and barely a cloud in the sky!

Here are a few of the images I took...

 

 

ALL rights reserved – do not use these images without written permission from the copyright owner.

Cheers, Lawrence

Scotland

Last week, I went on a 5 night camping trip, with 2 photography friends, upto the west coast of Scotland. This is an area I've always wanted to visit, so to make the most of our time there, we planned a rough route that took us over 1000 miles. We stopped lots of times along the ways, here's some places to name a few; Loch Lomond, Glencoe, Loch Moidart, The Old Man of Storr, Loch Brittle (amazing campsite), Plockton & the Bealach na Ba.

Here are a few images from my trip.

Loch Lomond:

Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye:

Loch Brittle:

Plockton:

Bealach na Ba:

Applecross coast road (looking toward Skye):

Here's a quick image of our wild campsite with campfire:

Looking into a Mamiya C330 TLR:

Hope you've enjoyed seeing my images of Scotland, I definitely plan to go back sometime in the near future! Have you been to the west coast of Scotland? where did  you go, what did you think?

ALL rights reserved – do not use these images without written permission from the copyright owner.

Cheers, Lawrence