I had an amazing day photographing for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain earlier this week in Nottingham. Eight days a year some members of the orchestra travel across the country to work with schools to help them to engage young people with music and hopefully encourage school children to pick up instruments and start taking lessons. Members of the NYO play at a very high standard and had just completed performances in Berlin and at the Proms in London.

School children attended performances by the orchestra in their school hall and had smaller music sessions where the musicians talked about their instruments and why they loved playing them. As ever in schools lighting was tricky and, understandably, the NYO didn’t want flashguns going off as this would distract the audience so everything you see here was shot in available light on a high ISO. I confess by the time I got home I was exhausted as I moved constantly from one room to the next to photograph the different sessions.