1 BLUE RDThe Schools Construction Challenge, sponsored by Blue Circle Industries, took place at Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh today ( THURSDAY 22/4/99 ). The challenge was open to schools throughout Edinburgh and the Lothians and attracted over 140 students who took part in building challenges such as roofing, paving and cement moulding.
Fourteen year old Niall Martin, a pupil at Edinburgh's Royal High School tries to place the final tile in the roofing challenge.
© 1999 Roger Donovan, Media Photos.

A change from the celebrity photography of recent posts with this PR image from 1999. The picture is from a commission from what was then Blue Circle Cement to photograph a “Schools Construction Challenge” event that they were sponsoring in Edinburgh. As well as photographing the teams from schools throughout the area and recording youngsters taking part in the event as they worked their way through a series of construction based challenges the brief also required a selection of images for distribution to the media to gain exposure through press use.

This image is at first glance a fairly straight forward simple image but an image like this doesn’t just happen. The final image had to be visualised and then created. The youngsters challenge here was to build the roof using tiles and I took pictures as they worked but the images were untidy with too much happening at once and needed simplifying. Watching them work gave me the idea for the picture but I had to wait until they had finished the exercise and then with some help from an understanding PR man, persuade the organisers to remove two tiles to give me the chance to make the image with the lad putting his head through the roof.

I took some artistic licence to create an image that could not have occurred naturally and used the roof as the backdrop to keep the image clean. I think the picture works well and gets over the essence of the competition with some subtle branding and it also got some publicity for the sponsors as The Scotsman newspaper used it the following day as a picture lead in their business section.