NICOLA TREE

For this years Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, I opted to save on the cost of booking a hotel and decided to commute up for the final day specifically to photograph their leader Kemi Badenoch’s keynote speech.
Having booked the cheapest available ticket to arrive on time, the 06:21 AM train from Euston, I arrived at the venue to find a noticeably quieter press room with fewer journalists and photographers than I'd seen at the Labour Conference. On the up side there were free bacon sandwiches, tea, and coffee, I headed over to the Getty Images desk at the back of the room to catch up and get low down on the lighting from the other photographers.
Before Kemi took the stage, both the shadow Home Secretary Chris Philps and shadow Chancellor Nick Timothy delivered their speeches. The venue was a theatre with several tiers of seating. There was far more room to move around with less photographers and significantly fewer officials stopping you, which made the actual job of photographing the stage infinitely easier. My plan paid off: within a couple of hours, I spotted one of my photos illustrating a Telegraph article online. Seeing it live on the site made the slow, two-and-a-half-hour journey home on a cheap ticket almost entirely worth it.