Karen Strunks Professional Birmingham-based Freelance Photographer

My new role at Talk About Local

I am delighted to announce that from next week I will be working with the Talk About Local team as their training support executive!

What is Talk About Local? As the TAL website says, ” Talk About Local is a project to give people in their communities a powerful online voice. We want to help people communicate and campaign more effectively to influence events in the places in which they live, work or play”

Director of TAL, Will Perrin gives and insightful talk about how he engaged his community at a grass routes level in Kings Cross and gives examples of other hyper local blogs and what they do.

As the training support executive my role, amongst other things, will be to helping to deliver their training programme.

Talk About Local and Nicky Getgood from Digbeth Is Good were the inspiration behind me starting my hyper local blog about my neighbourhood and the community.

What does this mean for my photography business? Simply that it will continue, but naturally I’ll have to scale it back. My work at TAL will be over 4 days a week, so I will have time available to take your photographs for you.

Why the change? Looking over the past year or two I realise I am not ‘just’ a photographer. With my passion for social media, and my love of bringing online communities together, as I do with the 4am Project, there has been a huge shift in what I do, and photography is a part of that, but not the whole, and I want to be able to use all my skills and knowledge. I receive more requests for practical help from people who have seen what I do, and want to know how they can get started in photography or in the online world, so even that has brought opened up a new area for me. Certainly my trip to New York helped me to see the bigger picture (excuse the pun!), and has given me the inspiration to make some ‘life’ changes, my work being just one aspect.

I count myself lucky to live in a city where there is a huge creative and digital industry. Personally, creativity is not just what I do, but who I am as well, and I want to keep growing and learning and this new role is a natural progression.

I’m looking forward to working in a  business that uses social media and helps hyper local bloggers with their journey and I very much look forward to joining the Talk About Local team and working with Will Perrin, Nicky Getgood, Mike Rawlins and Clare White.

As you will have gathered, I’m back from New York!  It was an amazing experience and one of the best things I have done. I’m in the process of editing (1000’s!) photographs and video and you can follow my adventures over on the Big Apple Unpeeled blog.