Honley Youth Group

Friday night for young folk in Honley, West Yorkshire

A while back I headed over to Honley, West Yorkshire to photograph Honley Youth Group this was for their community listing on the Honley website. I had arranged a bit of a rendezvous with Stephen Knight (aka Super Steve) to get some of the young people together for a little photo shoot.

There is only one Super Steve

Super Steve never does anything by halves so he had arranged for his mates to bring some electric go-karts, fantastic news! So, I had a vision of loads of people getting involved getting really competitive and therefore getting loads of ACE pictures.

In reality

The kids started at first to get involved with the go-karts but as people have very limited attention spans they got a bit bored of this quite quickly. As this was still in between lockdown part one and two we had quite a few restrictions to deal with, but I will come on to that in a little bit.

Photography problems

On arrival I realised that the venue was pretty dark, so my initial thought of trying to capture the go karting in natural light went straight out of the window. Time for Plan B, I set up a few off-camera flashes, so it enabled me to be able to light the go-karts. So, now I had some light to play with I then needed somewhere to shoot. As a photographer I like clean, images but unfortunately, everywhere I looked the background was either cluttered or didn’t look great. So, my solution was to lay on the floor to capture the action.

Young people

As soon as I started to shoot the go-karting, there were some kids that would just either give me the bird (not the best for a community website picture) or they would just hide their face. So, I quickly narrowed down the people who I could use as models. So, I spent some time just trying to capture these people with excited faces and enjoying the go-karting.

What else could I do?

Whilst the go-karting was on, I kept noticing a girl with a pink Tik-Tok Hoodie just dancing all of the time. I knew that all she wanted to do was to put some music on and dance and I could see she wasn’t shy. When she went outside I just asked her and her mate just to do anything, just so I could capture something else other than go-karts.

Table football

I then noticed in the corner of the community centre a table football table so with a little help, I took it outside and got the kids to have a little game. I could see instantly that this was going to give me much better results than the go-karting. For one, I could shoot with natural light and the kids were engaged, so they would forget about me.

I also noticed Tik-Tok girl was still dancing about so I could capture this as well as the table football. The shoots that I do for Honley are only very quick but I wasn’t going to leave without the pictures that I needed.

Not leaving till I’m happy

As soon as I had the outdoor pictures I knew that I had everything that I needed and more for my brief. I’ve been doing this for a long time and there was no way that I was going to leave without pictures that I was happy with. Ideally, I would love to just head over to the youth club on a Friday night (not in COVID) times but at the moment I have to do what I can.

If you have any community activities that you need some great images for then please get in touch john@johnsteelphotography.com