I’ve reached a place in my photographic journey where I feel like I have finally found my voice  - however faint, and not quite broken in, it may be. But what do I do with that voice? How do I take this voice and make an impact? Instead of shouting into the aether on Instagram, I’d like to have conversations with a more relevant audience.

I love street photography. Capturing beauty in the mundane of everyday life is such a great feeling. It’s meditative, and that feeling when everything is just right - light, shadow, and framing all creating a total banger is such a rush. But are individual photos without the context of a series enough? The photographers I look up to - Fan Ho, Alex Webb, Todd Hido, Bruce Davidson and Maria Svarbova (to name a few), tell stories through projects and bodies of work. To evolve as a photographer - I feel like creating cohesive bodies of work is important.

Lensculture Award

I recently entered the Lensculture photography competition and got an editor’s choice award for one of my images:

I love this image and have a huge A0 Framed copy of it in my house.

It was great to get validation for my work and be told I have a clear style by the judges. Feedback was that they would have preferred to see me enter a series of images to tell a story, instead of the 5 seperate, unrelated images that I submitted.

This only cemented the need to start creating photo projects. But where to start? YouTube? One of the countless online courses? I really wanted to attend a face to face course, but being outside of London is normally a wasteland for photography.

Luckily, Stills, a centre for photography based in Edinburgh had a Documentary Photography course “Documentary Photography: From Seed to Sapling” taking place at the end of March 2024. This was run by Michael Vince Kim, an award winning documentary photographer and photojournalist who shoots for a number of publications including the New York Times.

Get to the review already!

Okay, sorry, I don’t want this to become one of those online recipe blogs where you hear a life story before getting to how to make the thing!

TLDR: I 100% recommend this course. Take it.

If you are getting serious about your street photography; want constructive feedback on your portfolio; want advice on creating a body of work and learn about the steps to become a photojournalist take this course. Just sitting in a room with like minded people was worth the cost of the course for me to be honest.

The course in March 2024 cost £199. There are discounts available - check the Stills website for more information.

TLDR over, if you’d like to find out more about what the course entailed read on.

The venue - Stills photography centre

Stills is a centre for photography based in the centre of Edinburgh on Cockburn Street. They have a gallery for exhibitions and events, production facilities, darkroom, printers, a library and a number of computers for editing work. They also have a number of courses covering a whole range of photographic subjects.

The facilities are so good I’m honestly thinking of becoming a ‘friend’ of Stills.

I went to a recent Cafe Royal Books exhibition with my wife there and it was fantastic. I recommend checking out their website - there are so many small documentary/street books in their collection and some of the images are just so cool.

As it’s in the centre of town it is very easy to get to - once I got off my bus from Cramond, it was a short 15-minute walk. I managed to take these bangers on the way:

Day one

The first day started with introductions. There were six attendees (including myself). Everyone was creative with a mixture of life experiences and photographic styles. We had concert, travel, abstract, portraiture and BTS film photography. Like I said earlier, just sitting in a room with a group of creative people who have a serious interest in the same things as me was worth the course cost alone.

Michael Vince Kim, the instructor for the course introduced himself and spoke about all his experiences documenting Korean migrant communities in the Kazakh steppes and his award-winning work photographing Korean migrant communities in Cuba. He spoke about how winning this competition set him up to be mentored by Magnum photographers and put his work in front of decision-makers at leading global publications, including the New York Times.

I’m not going to go into detail about everything covered in the course, as you should definitely sign up. I thoroughly recommend it.

On the first day, we covered:

Formulating ideas for a project
The difference between reportage and street photography
Identifying good topics
Visual language

There was a PowerPoint presentation but it never felt like we were being spoken to, more like an engaging conversation - it was never boring.

Day one mini project

At lunch, we were given a couple of hours to have lunch and take a series of images about a street, or monument or just chronicle our lunch. Michael did not expect a groundbreaking project, just evidence that we had absorbed the ideas discussed on the first day.

I decided to head to Waverley Train Station and got incredibly lucky. Initially, I was just planning to capture tourists arriving in Edinburgh, looking confused; disembarking trains and wandering around the train station.

That was until a STEAM TRAIN pulled into Edinburgh with a lot of well-dressed passengers and I hit an absolute gold mine! I couldn’t believe it. You can see the gallery below. I even bumped into Kenny Williams, a train expert who has written two books about trains in Edinburgh. I’m never confident approaching strangers but after being inspired by Michael, I decided to go out of my comfort zone to engage with people while out taking photos where appropriate and it paid off!

We didn’t have time to review and edit the images on day one, but when we came back on day two I got great positive feedback from Michael and the rest of the class. It’s just really nice to have people IRL say something nice about your work!

Project

The course’s major component was a photography project that we had to put together using what we had learnt so far.

We had a week to take a series of no more than 15-20 images
We had to combine scenes and present them like a story - a start, middle and end
It could be about anything and be as mundane as we wanted. We just needed to show what we had absorbed everything to apply to future, more serious endeavours with longer timeframes

I decided to focus my project on the Edinburgh Tram system.

I had never ridden the tram in Edinburgh before, despite having lived here for 13 years. It’s quite a controversial talking point in Edinburgh, having overrun its budget and timescales dramatically. The further extension into Leith has been pretty successful though despite some questionable design choices leading to the ‘worst bike lane in the world’.

Over three, wet, miserable days, I rode on the trams for 3 hours each day from Leith to the airport. I took nearly 2,000 images the best of which you can find in the gallery below:

I was really happy with the images taken and had really good feedback from Michael. I have since edited the gallery as I had some weaker images in there. Michael’s main feedback was to be ruthless as a series of images is only as strong as its weakest entry.

I threw myself into this even though I found the sheer amount of time and boredom of taking the tram so many times really taxing. I was happy with how it paid off, especially as ‘up close and personal’ to people is not the kind of photography I normally do.

I used a Ricoh GR3x to stay inconspicuous but also have access to great image quality.

Day two

Outside of the feedback for our project/portfolio day two was really interesting.

A further discussion about visual language and putting together visual stories
Editing and sequencing - including looking at some of Michael’s contact sheets from his award-winning photo series
Getting into the photojournalism industry
- How much photo gigs typically pay
- The kind of work available
- Importance of photo reviews both paid and free
- Getting exposure
- Entering competitions/awards and which to focus on/avoid
- Mentorships
- Grants

Final thoughts

I cannot recommend this course enough. Michael was a fantastic instructor, with award-winning work, who has a wide range of experience and inside knowledge of the industry.

Considering street meet-ups and weekend workshops can cost upwards of £300 - £2,500, the £199 cost of the course is an absolute no-brainer.

My only criticism is that we only had 15ish minutes each for our project/portfolio reviews. It would have been great if Day 2 focused more on looking at us as photographers. But, maybe that will be something else that is set up in the future.

We were the first cohort for this course, so I’m sure Michael has some ideas to make things work smoother and more effectively. I look forward to signing up for any future events/learning available.

Find out more about all the courses available at Stills here.

REVIEW - '“Documentary Photography: From Seed to Sapling” by Michael Kim at Stills, Edinburgh.