Next up was the yard of a pub, transferred into a paradise of pretty flowers and wanting promotion for its entry in 'Derby in Bloom'. Steve mentioned that this would be a good opportunity for me to take the photo with my camera and have it printed in the paper. But as he took it out of the camera bag and handed it to me he must have caught the look of panic on my face and instead, set it up for the lighting conditions and handed it to me to use in any case, but without real instruction. I thought my photos came out really well!

Then we grabbed a sandwich (there isn't really a lunch break as such) and returned to the office where I watched and tried to take note of what Steve was doing. Basically, he downloaded the photos, choses three or four from each event, tweaked them, saved them in a certain type of folder which was then send to Victoria's computer and saved in another folder showing the date. (All photos had to be named and allocated a number which denoted the photographer by initial and included the date) A black and white picture of the photos was printed to show roughly what they looked like. Another thing, all photos had to be taken in both portrait and landscape mode to make such one of them would fit the space earmarked for the photo. I then sat with Michelle, who along with three others was responsible for the layout of each page. It looked highly complicated, but as she said, once you know how to do it, it's more or less a case of copy and paste as everything goes to her fully written, all she has to do is pop it in and sometimes resize the images. The good thing about her job was when you've finished for today , you really have finished!

Things had slowed down a bit by now, which was good as it meant there was time to get to know the other photographers. Jon, who as I said " looked as though he'd done a full day's work by 1.00pm (he'd been on a 'stake out' at Wirksworth since 5.30am - something about a man and his dog...) and Ian who had years of wisdom stored up, but seemed only to be able to take very dark photos - well it was a rainy day...Adam popped up sometime later, the joke on him was that he was fresh out of college, which of course he wasn't he just looked (as they all teased) about 12!

Victoria spent all day disappearing into important meetings and never spent more than a few minutes in the same place. She buzzed with the same amount of energy whether the clocked showed 9.00am or 5.00pm and she was great fun too. Things had now ground to a halt and then Victoria found she needed one last photo to go with a story of someone who had received an on the spot fine for dropping litter. Steve collected up all the empty containers he could find and the rain having eased off we headed off for a likely location (about 10 metres away!) He staged the photo with litter strewn about next to a plastic bag. He then posed me to look as though I was walking away dropping an empty can from my hand. The shot was taken. Then I pointed out that the person fined was male, so shouldn't I take a photo of him as the culprit. As he'd already set up the photo, all I had to do was press the shutter... success... 'My' photo credited with my name appeared on page 14 of the DET the following morning.

The start of a new career...?