My first stranger in three months. Lockdown put a stop to my 100 strangers project, but now restrictions are lifted slightly I have ventured out onto the street again, maintaining social distancing .
I am pleased to introduce Jim to you.
I met Jim on St. Mary’s park, Arnold, while walking Ruby my little whippet dog.
Jim was sat on a bench having a drink from a flask. As I walked past him I nodded and asked him if he was enjoying his drink. He told me he had been to Costa Coffee (it had opened this week) and got a takeaway coffee and poured it in his flask and then walked to the park to enjoy his drink.
I asked Jim if he was a local. He told me he lived on the road adjacent to the far side of the park and originated from South Shields, but came to Nottingham for a job in Beeston. I asked if that job was at Plessey. He said yes it was, although back in the day it was Ericsson’s rather than Plessey. I told him my first job when I left Uni’ was at Plessey Beeston, so we had a chat about the company we had both worked for. When I started working there in 1978 there were almost 15,000 employees on the site, so although we both worked for the same company, there was little chance of us meeting, especially as Jim worked in Telecomms and I worked in IT.
We then had a chat about local walks in the area and Jim told me about a walk that takes him from his house onto the “new estate” and then onto the fields above Redhill. I told him I was aware of the route as my daughter lived on the “new estate”.
I asked Jim about his face mask. He told me he had started wearing it this week as he had been to the Doctors and it was mandatory that you wear face protection when you visit the surgery. We both then had a whinge about Boris Johnson and his government’s handling of the Covid-19 situation.
Jim told me about his work at Plessey and the projects he’d worked on. He told me he had been to China working on a joint venture on telecomms. He said it was quite sad that the site we both once worked at is now an empty shell and China, which at the time Jim visited, was behind the rest of the world in telecomms technology , is now a leading the way on building the UK’s next mobile phone 5G network infrastructure.
When I asked Jim to be one of my strangers he agreed straight away “Shall I wear my Mask?”
I normally shoot “head shots” of my strangers with a nifty fifty prime lens on my Sony A6000. Today I did a full body shot, which helped me maintain social distancing. Having said that, I was shooting with a 35mm lens on a full frame camera, so I was probably not that much further away from my stranger as I would be with my “head shots” (but I was social distancing).
Thanks for being stranger number 216 Jim
Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page
https://www.flickr.com/groups/100strangers
My own strangers can be seen here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/57144254@N08/albums/72157657822400168
