On assignment to photograph Gordon Brown as he opens extension to Great Yarmouth College in Norfolk

As well as the wedding photography side of my business that I do with Antonella Muscat as part of Davis & Co Photographers I also take on more journalistic photography assignments


It was this side of my business that led me to be in Great Yarmouth on Monday 14th February to photograph Gordon Brown as he opened an extension to Great Yarmouth College

The £8 million pound extension was officially opened at the end of a 45 minute tour of the college where Mr Brown met students and college staff.

He also met people working in start-up businesses in the new Alchemy 2 which alongside the Alchemy Centre encourages innovation and new businesses to help stimulate the local economy by providing office space and business support for fledgling enterprises. Alchemy 2 was funded by the East of England Development Agency (EEDA)


Mr Brown was accompanied by the local MP Tony Wright, College principle Robin Parkinson, chair of governors Mike Field, Deborah Cadman Chief Executive of the EEDA. He also met with with Councillor Tony Smith the Mayor of Great Yarmouth.

Cut off, it was like going back to the dark ages of the early 1990's

I was planning to continue posting about my time at the SWPP conference back in January but due to some idiot using his digger to break a whole lot of high capacity fibre near to J6 of the M1 on Tuesday I have been without broadband for nearly 3 days. You might have thought that there would have been resiliency in the network that linked many of the residents of Letchworth, Hitchin, Harpenden, Luton, Leagrave and Houghton Regis to the internet but there wasnt i.e. 10 seconds work in a JCB and we were all cut off.

I'm going to do some research now to see if other internet service providers (ISP's) have the same single points of failure in their networks and will be posting my findings here

Starbucks, coppers and the SWPP Conference

Picture the scene, there I was sat in Starbucks on one of the arm chairs trying to write this blog posting. A couple of men join me near the window and sit on the sofa next to my chair

I mostly ignored them but as soon as I glanced up from my note book & magazine I could tell that they were plain clothed cops - I dont know why really, maybe it was their size 12 feet. Then a few minutes later they were joined by 2 other groups of rather cold looking cops from a local operation. I was totally surrounded (but didnt feel the need to put my hands up), it felt like I was on the set of The Bill, I reckon the banter was very similar.

Good luck with the shoplifting gang folks

Back on Plan B, I mentioned in my last posting that I had attended the annual SWPP (Society of Wedding & Portrait Photographers) conference back in January. I came away after 6 days with a head & notebook full of information and have spent the last 6 weeks making sense of it all and trying to put some of it into practice within the business.

I'd signed up for the Business School sessions which formed the first 2 days of the conference which was held at the Novatel in a rather cold, wet & snowy Hammersmith

The 1st session I went to was by Michael Turner - Networking: It's good to talk. Michael covered all of the basic of using networking as a means of growing a business including the importance of developing a networking strategy as a part of the overall marketing plan. This is certainly a area I need to work on more as most of my networking seems to be happening online using social networking such as Facebook (both with Davis & Co Photographers and my own personal page) and twitter 

I've been exploring face to face networking "clubs" such as BNI, does anyone have any experience of them and their usefulness ?