Nick Clegg Visits Eastbourne

The Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, visited Eastbourne today on part of a  tour of the country to try to convert any last minute waverers in the final few hours before voting starts tomorrow.  Eastbourne is one of the marginals that the Lib Dems hope to win and given the number of poster they have up around the town, I'd be amazed if they don't.  The current Conservative MP, Nigel Waterson, has made himself rather unpopular with many voters by supporting the introduction of parking meters and traffic wardens in the town.  I feel this may well come back to bite him tomorrow...

There was quite a reasonable turnout from the public along with a strong media presence.  If the film crews were hoping for a "microphone moment" (just to add a bit of balance you understand), the closest they got was that it kept cutting out every few seconds.  This must have been pretty irritating for Mr Clegg, although he certainly didn't show it.

Having seen both David Cameron (very smooth, very convincing) and Gordon Brown (very... well, very Gordon Brown), it was interesting to see Nick Clegg at work.  He comes across extremely well. 

The only thing that concerns me about Nick Clegg doing so well is the idea of a hung parliament.  It's not the politics of it that I have sleepless nights about, it's just that if Gordon were to somehow get back into No 10 he would grin at us.  I don't understand why his image consultants let him grin, it's creepy.  You could use his grin to frighten bad children (although I'm sure that legislation has already been introduced to prevent this).  It's the sort of grin that only Roald Dahl could have thought up.  It's like something from a 1950's B horror movie - "The Grinner from the Black Lagoon", "Grinzilla" , "Attack of the Grinning Leeches".  I think the answer is to be "tough on grinning, tough on the causes of grinning".

The only minor fly in the ointment for Nick Clegg's visit is that a local Lib Dem activist was arrested last night for allegedly stealing Conservative party posters from around the town - not the brightest move on the eve of your bosses arrival. 

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Commercial Photographers Sussex

Annual Report Photography

I'm just in the process of archiving off my hard drives and came across this project from early last year. The Woodland Trust had just bought Brede High Woods and commissioned me to photograph it for their annual report. Although it's quite large, Brede is not an easy place to photograph, there are only a couple of places where you can get any sort of overview and even then only as a fairly thin ribbon of trees (I did suggest a helicopter but sadly it wasn't within their budget). With a two week deadline it wasn't possibly to be too choosy about the weather, so a lot of time was spent trudging round the woods in the rain, covered in mud, looking for locations - great fun!

As a bonus I woke one morning a couple of days before the deadline to discover that a bigger than expected pile of snow had been deposited over the South East. It made for a slightly hairy drive to get over to Brede (we're not exactly used to driving in snow here), but you can't turn down an opportunity like that.

The snow didn't last long, the sun came out at about 9.30 and it had pretty much all melted away by midday, but it was lovely while it lasted.

Despite a lot of rain and grey skies over the two weeks there were a few periods when the weather and light were fantastic. In the end the photo's were used on a double page centre spread in their annual report and also on their annual fund-raising campaign brochure, a very nice result for one of my favourite projects.

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Commercial Photographers in Sussex

Public Relations Photography

With all the excitement surrounding our Government at the moment, I thought I would share some recent photographs of a few members of parliament, just in case they become ex-members of parliament and end up being of rather less interest than they currently are.

First off is Laura Moffatt MP. Laura is an exceptionally nice lady, one of the few MP's that take the time to talk to photographers and as you can see, she is will try pretty much anything to help out with a photo-shoot:

I think I would struggle to persuade Gordon Brown to try a pose like that... actually I'm not sure I would want him to.

Here we have Bob Ainsworth MP having a go in a flight simulator. I had to wait outside when it was "in-flight" due to restrictions on the number of passengers so I don't know how well he did, but I didn't hear any screaming coming from inside and when they opened the door no one had been sick, so I guess he must have done fairly well.

Finally here is John Hutton MP, Secretary of State for Defence. I get the impression that Mr Hutton is a very decent chap, with a genuine interest in defence and does try very hard to obtain funding, although given the article in this weekends Sunday Times about yet more defence cut-backs and project cancellations he probably doesn't get as much as he would like.

This is not a political or pro-military blog, but here's a thought. How about every year the names of twenty MP's are pulled at random out of a hat and they have to spend two months with a front line operational unit, no exceptions (even if it's the PM) and no special treatment. It would be interesting to see what effect the risk of having to face the consequences of their own decisions would have on defence policy.

Well, it's election day so I suppose I had better go and vote...

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Public Relations Photographers