This activity was about co-authoring a story based on some new that you have meet. I decided to base this activity on the dialogue I had with Kevin the Skipper on Thistle a Thames Sailing Barge. Kevin has been skippers barges for years and during the passage I spent some time to get to better understand the history of the barges and to learn a little more about Kevin as a person and the following series of images tell part of the story.
When you are crewing on any boat for the first time you end up with the most basic jobs such as making tea and pulling on the ropes as sailing is dangerous if you do not know what you are doing.
The barges are designed to be sailed by just a skipper and a mate. Kevin as a experienced barge skipper knew exactly how much sail to make maximum speed across the water.
Setting and holding the correct course is key to sailing a barge especially in some of the narrow channels around the Essex coast. An incorrect course could leave the barge stranded until the next high tide.
Barges were brought by interested parties a sailor, maybe a group of merchants and chandlers who would fit out the barge. Given the coast of a barge each person or business would by a share in the barge and typically a barge might be divided into 64 shares. This created for complex ownership history.
The skipper Kevin liked his tea black and very strong in fact when making tea he would frequently say leave the teabag in.
This sequence of images captured the essence of the dialogue that took place between Kevin an experienced skipper and myself during the passage from Harwich to Maldon.
It was an interesting experience creating a story about a person and their job using images without actually including them in the images. I feel this activity would help me on journalist or editorial commissions where capturing a tight set of images to tell a story is an important skill for a photographer to posses.
