Photos4Charities
“The receiving is in the giving.”
Combining charity, volunteering, street photography and mentoring.
The efforts of many volunteers in many other fields such as sports provided the inspiration to find a way to do something similar in the field of photography where I’ve had a keen interest for decades.
Street photography itself is often stealth when it comes to photographing people but this is a much simpler and open proposition.
Something that is a win for a passerby, a win for a charity, a win for an experienced photographer (the master with all the gear) and a win for a photographer’s assistant (the apprentice looking for experience).
After some head scratching an idea has become a proposition that might actually work. It is in the process of being “field tested” in a friendly environment, at least in terms of workflow and ironing out technical issues. So here’s the basic process:
- Find two people, a photographer and an assistant who volunteer to spend a few hours on the high street taking photos. This would be across a roster so whilst only once a month or so our volunteers may only have to do it once or twice a year.
- Create interest on the high street with a little showboating to attract passersby, who see the fun in a little photo-shoot that will give them some unexpected cool memories for a small donaction to a local charity of their choice (in Ilkley there’s 7 charity shops within 150m of each other on the high street) and just need to present a receipt to the team and give their consent (important if children are being photographed). Taking a receipt as a proxy for a donation is the left field financial/commercial bit. A charity of the passersby choice gets the money directly and no money needs to change hands with photography team, i.e. and no need to have a bank account, a bucket for coins or to ever go to a bank…genius!
- Use a cloud based repository where photos can be uploaded/edited and accessible through the internet. Ok, this might cost some money in some form, but it needs to be secure, so a commercial repository like Microsoft’s OneDrive or Google’s Google Drive recommended! Pre-populate folders with a date time slot stamp from a template and you’re ready to go and can partition photographs simply.
- Once images are uploaded just use a browser to provide a shareable/photographable QR code for any web page (Chrome definitely does this as a “sharing” option)…which in our case is a One Drive cloud folder with the right permissions for a given date/time/location that’s only been populated with the photos for that particular session…that bit is important for privacy reasons!
And so the concept was born and will be put to the test in the summer of ’25 in Ilkley, a beautiful ex-Roman town of cafes, pubs and independent shops all beneath the ever present Ilkley Moor in West Yorkshire.
The town is easily accessible by train or car!