Living my way
My name is Jamie Schofield and my project ‘Living my way ‘, running from February until May 2017 documents the lives of three people who try and live as sustainable as possible. I documented the lifestyles of both a couple and a single man. The couple, Mike and Vicky live in a huge house and have a very minuscule carbon footprint. The list of things they do/ have includes bee keeping, solar panels, making their own bread, water heaters, windows being triple glazed and much more. Whereas Peter had a much smaller house and garden, yet seemingly managed to pack more into it. For the theme of my project, I wanted to help document their very specific lifestyle to help produce quality images and spread the word of living sustainably. Interestingly, there were many things that I couldn’t physically photograph that are equally as important as the things I could photograph. Things like the good insulation of the house, the temperature keeping of Peter’s greenhouse, the triple glazed windows and more specifically how much energy these three people were actually giving back to the grid. I wanted to document every aspect of their lifestyles and to do this, I had to spend quite a long time with them, listening to their stories and experiencing what it is like to live that way. I more specifically wanted to focus on the beekeeping aspect of this because neither kept bees for honey, as so many people expect. However, they kept bees because bees are actually homeless until they find a hive and therefore they are actually helping the bee community massively, and it also gives a nice atmosphere to the garden. Peter’s garden was tiny, yet he managed to pack so much into it; he grew his own organic fruit and vegetables, had a bee hive, a wormery and a compost dump, whereas Mike and Vicky, although had a larger garden, probably only had a similar amount to Peter.