Haywood Jones Photography

So..... The Photography Farm.

I'll be honest, I have been wanting to go to the Farm for QUITE some time.

Every one I know who has been on the farm has absolutely raved about it. How incredible an atmosphere it is, what a great community of wonderful photographers, and of course epic shoots and some good old fashioned learning too. (There had also been rumours floating around of copious amounts of alcohol being consumed and a swimming pool but these points are just sidelines.)

I had been saving the pennies to be able to enrol but the piggy bank was just growing painfully slowly for my liking!!

Lisa Devlin, being the wondrous fairy photography god mother that she is, sometimes runs a competition to win a free scholarship place. My previous attempt at wooing her with my entry had somewhat failed (see piccie below of my entry) The scary, stalker, axe murderer look wasn't winning me any points it seemed...

If you haven't seen the original Harvey and Rabbit advert go and have a look at it here..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20UhjXpFX_c

It seems like a million miles ago now, but June arrived and I was busy packing up my bags for the Glastonbury Festival, when I saw Lisa was running another competition.

There was no time for me to sort anything out before I left, so was hoping I would be able to do something to wow the farm peeps at the festival instead.

Inspiration was everywhere at Glasto, should I revert to old school hippie, put some flowers in my hair and streak naked across the field with *pick me Lisa* daubed on my body? Should I get the ukelele out and *jam* with my mates a little ditty about the farm? Should I crowd surf with a big banner to The Smashing Pumpkins? The choice was proving too much.

Until.... a wander around the site on Wednesday Morning led us to the Glastonbury Free Press tent. The Glasto Free Press prints a daily newspaper about all the goings on on site, plus a few carefully selected messages from festival goes. The paper gets a massive distribution around site, and is popular for more than its obvious uses as seating/temporary shad/emergency loo roll. It is a bloody good read too!

So, a plan was hatched. I would place an ad in the paper in a Desperately Seeking Susan kind of a way. The ad went in Weds for printing Friday first thing, leaving me enough time to photograph it and get it sent over to Lisa before the deadline.

Hurrah, surely this was going to be a winner, yes? Yes?

Well. No as it would turn out.

Friday morning rolled around and (and at 2.30am, when the press opened) I wandered trough the hoards of cider fuelled sunburnt happy clapper festival goers to pick up my copy. Now the press machine itself is a bit of a labour of love. Built in the 1950s and not what it used to be, it is a gorgeous, huge, clunking, not always wanting to play ball kind of a beast. I arrived at the tent to find it had broken down.

Humph. Never mind, so my master plan may have not worked but there was still time to go to plan b (the crowd surfing? The naked streaking?) in the morning. I headed off to bed for the night scheming a plan for the morning.

Ok, so morning turned into the afternoon and we didn't get up until 2.30pm : /

KNowing the deadline was that day, I checked the Photography Farm page to see that they had already picked a winner NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

How could this be? Some scamp called Naomi Dixon had won the place??!!! I resigned myself I had missed out and decided to enjoy the festival instead. Hopefully there would be another competition running again soon.

The printer did kick back into life over the weekend, and the paper went out on Sunday morning. WAY too late for me to bother sending it over to Lisa at the farm, but I got a copy anyway.

Well, as it would happen, the farmers appear to be EVERYWHERE, and one had seen the ad at Glasto and passed it onto Lisa...

I may not have got my entry in in time before the closing date, but the very kind hearted Lisa got in touch after seeing it and basically made me an offer I could refuse! A kind of runners up place as it was.

So off I went clicking my heels off to the farm.

The other farmers were amazing. Such a wonderful bunch of people and I was very lucky to get to hang out with them and learn some cool stuff in the process.

We laughed, I cried, we all drank probably a little too much (I was still getting over Glasto so my threshold levels were low!) and got the chance to shoot a beautiful style shoot too. There is si much more I could tell you about the farm, but you know what.... get yourself along there and experience it first hand. It is amazing.

Here are just a few shots from my time there. Aaaaah, those dreamy (and slightly sweaty) summer days........