Since being in the UK, I have opened my eyes to the vast amount of opportunities available to me for my future career. The main reason for this is due to my favorite class at Nottingham Trent called Futures. This class delves into how one would find a career in the field of photography, and our core project for the semester is to complete work for a client. In our 4th week in the course, a woman came in from LeftLion Magazine, which is a prominent magazine in Nottingham that primarily covers current events happening in Nottingham. It also spotlights businesses within Nottingham. They are currently revamping their website, and for our class, we have been split into three teams to photograph about 28 locations around Nottingham. With each location, we have to communicate with the business owners to shoot inside their building and hopefully shoot a portrait of the owner, if it is an independently owned business, and we are tasked with captioning our images for the website. Once submitted, LeftLion will use our images within their content while giving each independent student credit for their work, allowing each student to have their work published by an accredited publishing company. I was thrilled about this assignment. Each year the class is given a new brief for different organizations and businesses around Nottingham, and working for LeftLion this year seemed like a win. Ultimately, it was a huge win for me. I was given the location of a pub close to downtown called the Canalhouse. This pub was beautiful, and I was given the mission to contact the store and try to get permission to shoot. I was instantly given permission and I was allowed to come before hours and do whatever I wanted. The images I obtained were beautiful. The class gave me real-world experience of not just working with a client like LeftLion, but working with a small business, the Canalhouse. I can put this publication in my portfolio, and illustrate my experience with shooting inside a restaurant/pub. This experience has impacted my future career path because it opened up new possibilities for me, and this was only a small portion of what Futures gave me as a course. Ultimately, if I only learned useful information in my Futures course while abroad, I would call my education at NTU a success, as it was beneficial to me as a photographer to have hands-on experience off campus, as all of my previous experience has been on campus or with graduates at NAU. I am excited for my images to be published on their website in the future.
