Impromptu Collaboration Part 1

Yeah, so, I've talked before about the advantages of being on FaceBook, and here is another example of that. I really do believe that it offers us opportunities to engage with people we might not otherwise get the chance to meet, and recently, that's exactly what happened to me.

There's this local photographer called Tom, actually he's more of a digital artist, but he also does some photography. Basically, he commented on one of the pictures I put up on FaceBook, and so that made me want to look at his profile and have a look at his stuff. I liked what he was doing, so that led me to commenting back. Basically, over the period of a couple of months or so, we were just commenting and messaging back-and-forth, you know, offering support / critique, ideas, locations, that sort of thing. One of the biggest things that we had in common was that we were both at similar stages in our photography, and we both had similar goals for the near future. But maybe most importantly, we both had a the same kind of open attitude, meaning that he would gladly share any information or knowledge that he had with me, and vice-versa - there was absolutely no pretentiousness.

After a while, we just thought, you know, lets go for it, lets actually get our asses in gear, sort something out, get it together, and produce something. As it turns-out, he already had a shoot lined-up for the end of the week, which was 3 or 4 days away. We hadn't actually met 'in real life' at this point, so the day before the shoot, we met at the location, in Newport. We thought we'd just meet-up, have a bit of a chat, and see if we thought we could work together, plus discuss plans for the actual shoot. So I made my way over to Newport, of course, the closer I got, the less sunny it became, slowly sucking any joy and warmth out of the weather. Welcome to the wonderful, glorious city of Newport. Ah well...

Tom and I actually got on really well, which was a bit of a bonus. I mean, at first there was that thought in the back of my mind, "Hmmm...so you've decided to meet a complete stranger you met on the Internet, in a disused car park? Smart. Maybe just make-out a quick will before you leave home, as you probably won't make it back " you know? Fortunately, he didn't even try to murder / rape me, which was lovely. Bonus!

So we pretty-much just kinda chatted for a few hours, and it quickly became quite clear that he was a lot more technically proficient then I am (in just about every aspect conceivable!) but, despite that, we were both at very similar stages of our photography, and we both wanted to achieve similar things in the near future. We talked about the layout of the shoot, and any ideas we had, then went back home.

That's it for this post, but I will be following-up on this story in the near future about the actual shoot. The point of this post was to show what came out of a chance encounter on FaceBook, an encounter which will hopefully lead to some great photography, but in the very least, led to me meeting an interesting and artistic contemporary.