Life During Lockdown

This blog is kindly written by Jeremy Webb. Jeremy is a professional freelance photographer with 30 years experience. He currently specialises in landscape, still life, documentary and light painting.

Like so many freelancers in the arts/heritage sector, the world just seemed to shut down. I was fortunate to benefit from the self-employed income support payment, but otherwise I was floundering. I’m an art-based photographer, and support my core practice with a variety of satellite activities – writing, teaching, workshops, mentoring, distance-tutoring and outreach for a range of organisations. I’m also a part-time portrait and life model.

I’m often exasperated at how little understood the freelancers working life is, to those who ordinarily enjoy the security and comfort of same job/every day routine. An image cliché of the circus plate spinner comes to mind – keeping them all spinning on their sticks – projects, proposals, pitches, commissions, finding work, funding work, it’s non-stop - until something happens and all the plates crash to the floor. I try to find the right balance between never spreading myself too thin, nor putting all eggs into one basket. Thankfully, if one plate falls, the others still spin.

My ideas and approach

  • First things first: get ALL my services online, make everything contact-free, with smooth channels of delivery. Promote like mad, go crazy with reminders to existing clients - just because the world’s taken an extended lunch break, it doesn’t mean you’re not still hard at work and at your desk!

  • Add value where you can. Drop-off and Pick-up service? Free additional prints? Anything really, that means you’ve got something new to say, don’t repeat old messages and sound desperate in the process. Positivity goes a long way at a time when so many people are in despair.

  • Then, be totally ruthless - time to ditch those things that take the MOST of your time, for the LEAST of your earnings. Like throwing out a much-cherished jacket from the wardrobe – you know you’ve only worn it once, but you can’t stop kidding yourself  you’ll wear it again, one day. Except you wont. And you know it.

  • Evaluate and improve your portfolio material and visual communications.

And then there’s ZOOM! I’m sorry, I’ve tried to embrace it. Useful for a small number, but hopeless with a large group unless you’re a hosting Superhero. I’ve also had my fill of having to look up the hairy nostrils of middle aged men like myself. It’s not right. Learning a bit of Zoom etiquette was essential. Keep the camera level with face, at a decent distance. Take control of lighting and background, avoid flare. Leave out the bookcase in the background or you’ll look like a politician on Channel 4 News.

My first Zoom during lockdown was a disaster because I was so new to it. This was a workshop I delivered to 6th formers studying Art & Design. Due to safeguarding reasons which were perfectly reasonable and right, I wasn’t allowed to see any of the students, nor hear their voices. Questions were typed back to me using the chat function, with the host relayed them to me. The session itself meant that I was talking into a huge black hole – something I now realise I’m not the only one who has difficulties with – when under ordinary circumstances, my communication skills are rocket-boosted when I can see the whites of their eyes, in real time, with real people there in front of me. I need real yawns, not just suspected yawns :-D

Fortunately, I improved my technique, and my host generously gave me time to improve too, which I was very grateful for. A few weeks later I was being live-streamed by Zoom as I delivered black & white Photogram workshops for a community darkroom I’ve set up in Norwich – one of my other lockdown projects. This was hosted and filmed by Jack and Libby from Curious Directive, a theatre company who run the premises where the darkroom now resides.

Despite the difficulties associated with distancing and logistics, we managed to deliver darkroom kits to households nearby so that they could set up their own pop-up darkrooms at home – and follow along with me in real time, even under red safelight conditions, as I demonstrated the production of Man Ray-like photogram prints and we shared and cheered each other on via the MacBook Zoom screen. That was something special, and a tribute to Curious Directive who had the get-up-and-go to make it happen while everyone else had got-up-and-gone.

Reflecting during Covid-19

Lockdown has also been a time for intense reflection – on what’s most important about my freelancing life, how best to maintain my still effervescent passion for the medium of photography, and about moving forward into new areas of work – professional development by osmosis, as a natural and organic response to change.

To that end, I took a deep inventory of my photography over the last 30 years by revisiting old work, ruthlessly editing recent work, and generally getting back in touch with the photographer I knew I still was, but who had become a little bit like a fish in a tank; oblivious to the water within which I swam, unless removed from the environment. Over the following weeks, I started to:

  • Promote my high quality scanning, retouching and restoration services to genealogists, museums, heritage, archivists and family history lovers. Over the years I’ve won a few awards for my digital work – it would be a shame to let those skills drift

  • Utilize all and any online tuition methods and platforms to continue mentoring and online workshop delivery

  • Improve delivery and promotion of Photoshop workshops, CPD, and online tuition – Skype, Zoom, Duo etc

  • Plan and prepare collaboration projects and ideas to pitch with other artists

  • Promote my image library – extensive and diverse, after 30 years as a photographer.

  • I also wrote a 28-assignment Photography Boot Camp, as a fun teaching resource to aid photography tutors in schools. When lockdown happened I felt caught out. There was suddenly so much noise on social media with artist-educators more easily able to quickly translate their skills into Zoom-able workshops. Nevertheless I stuck to my guns in order to write something unhurried that links to A level marking schemata. My project has been taken up in a slightly adapted form by a local academy and they’ve asked me to help deliver it in conjunction with existing A level content.

But the single thing that most motivates me, is the fantastic opportunities that arise from a completely new direction in my photography – Light Painting. Google “light painting” and you’ll find swirly, graphic symmetrical light-forms reflected in shallow puddles at night. But I use it differently, to honour uniqueness, to venerate a single subject with light. With light painting, the canvas always starts out black. But throughout a 30 second exposure, I literally “paint” the light into the image with a carefully-choreographed journey of light – from a light pen, torch, or even a child’s light toy – around the subject, allowing the light to bring it into life. All the images accompanying this feature are light paintings.

I feel this style of photography is ideal for unique and historical artefacts, or still subjects that have particular properties of reflection, texture, form, and so on. Colours look amazing, popping out against black. And the “darkness” of the image brings drama and excitement to a subject in a way that brightly-lit white cube shots of forensic clarity can’t. Images almost say “Look at this! This has been here in the universe all along. It’s just been waiting for YOU to discover!”.

Continue the discussion

If you’re interested in contemporary photography, or any aspects of my work, please feel free to give me a follow. I love learning what drives other freelancers to do what you do. So follow me if you’re inclined, on any of the above if you want to collaborate or commission, or even if you’re just curious. I love feedback too, on anything I produce, so don’t hold back, I can take it J. I value stronger connections and welcome the great networking opportunities MFN provides.

With thanks to Jeremy Webb for his blog. You can contact Jeremy via , call 07857 167233 or view his work on his website. Jeremy’s limited edition prints are held in private collections and institutions in both Europe and North America and his landscape work is represented by the Millennium Agency in London. An experienced photography tutor, providing face-to-face, online and mentoring, he is the author of two books on contemporary photography (Creative Vision and Design Principles for Photography pub. Bloomsbury) images from which have been published and exhibited internationally.