The Fourth Challenge

Words by Egle Kisieliute, BA Photography

Scotland's Centre of Photography based in the heart of Edinburgh. They're "a champion for the important and powerful role that the medium of photography plays in the world today."

After leaving Banana Row studios, we all collectively groaned as we saw the location of our next bus challenge lead us right back into just the heart of the city. However, we were only down for a second before the excitement of what challenge was to come, took over. On the bus we got into research mode: our next challenge was in Stills Gallery, one of the first and best photo galleries in Scotland. From what we could discover they change their exhibitions as often as they can that people would get to see different variety of photography that is around us...

They run plenty of courses such as: Digital photography course, darkroom photography courses, alternative processes courses, editing, design and post production courses, video and sound courses. After seeing the range of possibilities available at Stills we were itching to discover what our Creative Challenge we would be.

All grievances of bus journeys forgotten, when we walked in and saw a white spacious gallery. We were greeted by the programme manager, Cheryl. She told us they don’t have any job opportunities at the moment, but you can get your name noted at Stills by volunteering. Then you are able to get a full access to all facilities available but to get to a higher position, it may take a few years as the competition is very high.

The Stills venue is very inspiring as you are able to see local artists exhibiting there and see how staff are trying to support young artists with everything they are capable of.

It was not only the gallery of Stills itself that fascinated us but also Cheryl and her journey to becoming the Programme Manager of Stills. Like all of us she came from a background in the Arts, and she was determined to achieve in a relevant career doing something she loved. After toughing out volunteering roles and balancing part time jobs, she succeeded in her goals and found her place in one of the best photography centres in the UK. She told us that being a well known name in the art world, they attract visitors from the name Stills itself, as well as from hosting some works from some of the great artists of our generation however Stills Gallery stills utilises the most common social media platforms as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and their website along, to remain relevant and keep their name out there.

However the most inspiring part of Stills was definitely our Creative Challenge. Other than the jingle at Banana Rows, our challenges had been more on the creative thinking side than the practically creative: we were a group of two designers and a photographer so we were all excited to have a real artistic image based challenge. The challenge we were given was to take 5 images located on the North Bridge with topics: Architecture, big, small, black & white and colour.

After downing a coffee - photographer style - we ventured off to North Bridge where there were crowds of people around; we tried quickly taking photos but it took as a while as we were all a bit of perfectionists when comes to photography. It was a drama filled challenge as we lost a member of our party among the crowd for a second, yelled at the sun for its 4 o' clock glare and one member even risked it all for her art as she ran to take a photo from the middle of the road... but we got there safely in the end with five awesome photographs to show for it, which you can view at the bottom.

It was an amazing opportunity to see that we can volunteer and meet new people and we would help gallery as they trust volunteers that the gallery will be open.