Engaged

KEEP your eyes open, be incredibly nosey and you’ll be surprised what picture opportunities you come across when you are wandering around Somerset and Dorset.

This is especially true when covering large events such as steam fairs and carnivals. There is always something going on it, probably too much.

Take the Great Dorset Steam Fair, this is a huge wonderful internationally renowned show covering vast acres of the Dorset countryside. It attracts hundreds of steam vehicles, thousands of sideshows and tens of thousands of visitors from all over Europe.

At most I will have to fill two pages with about 12 pictures, but these have to be made up of images containing local people and engines.

But it so easy to become side-tracked and lose concentration by focusing purely on the steam aspect of the weekend while forgetting that there are little visual gems around if you look.

You not only have to visualise how a picture should be taken, but how the photographs can be utilised on a page. This can be achieved by looking for colour in your pictures – red lorry on green grass against a blue sky – or a little piece of humour such as this week’s picture of a mobile toilet which made up part of a 1940s road building re-enactment display.

You’ll be pleased to know that after an extensive grilling of the stall owner I discovered, thankfully, that it was just a pair of old Wellington boots placed behind the loo door . . . phew!