Today’s fun, assuming it gets sunnier in Headingley by lunchtime… a Kodak Brownie Model I!
Acquired from the Wakefield Hospice warehouse for a fiver, it takes 620 film although I’ve managed to frig it for 120… and it’s f/14 so I’ll need the sun! More info about this particular model on Camerapedia.
It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my adventures in B&W photography and there have been some developments (pun intended) since then.
As it seemed to be a hobby which was sticking around, I invested in an Epson V700 scanner – various places including DPReview and Amateur Photographer stated that this was pretty much the best flatbed I could get. Why was I after a flatbed? Well I’d already anticipated I wanted to do some medium-format (MF) photography and most affordable slide scanners are limited to 35mm film and slides so would be useless after a while. The Epson was an investment, and proved to be an exceptional one.
Sadly what lets the Epson down is the software. It’s bundled with a package called SilverFast (version 6.6SE in the case of my purchase) which doesn’t work very well with the Apple UI and can be quite hard to use. It frequently crashed and ate a lot of CPU, and the version shipped was crippled in various ways (including being able to profile film emulsion – the entire reason I’d bought the scanner in the first place). When trying to use the support forum I came up against messages such as ‘Sorry but you cannot use search at this time. Please try again in a few minutes.’ Eventually I gave up and bought a copy of Vuescan which at a few cents shy of $40 was a lot cheaper than the SilverFast upgrade, gave better results and has a reasonable English-speaking support base. It would appear I’m not the only person to have done this switch…
So back to the photography: I did a photoshoot on Ilford Delta 3200, the subject being a punk-electro band called Minny Pops. Back in the early 80s they were on the same billing as Joy Division, they were a Martin Hannett-produced band and they were signed to Factory – hell, even Rob Gretton was involved with them; this made the act a perfect band when they played at The Brudenell Social Club in Leeds, perhaps in the style of one of my favourite photographers Kev Cummins. Here’s an example shot (dig around my Flickr stream for more), processed using Ilford Microphen high-grade developer (that particular image was picked up for publication by a UK music national which I’m quite chuffed about – still to see it ‘in the wild’ though). Not bad, and I resolved at that point to start using film a little more on gig shoots where the act would warrant it.
I spent most of January experimenting, and mentioned to my Grandmother what I was up to. She told me that she had a big box of photographic kit once belonging to my Grandfather and I was welcome to have a dig round and see what might be useful. It was quite a fun box-ful: the cache consisted of lots of lenses, a few USSR and GDR-manufactured 35mm bodies in varying condition, some filters and a few unexposed spools of film – but the unexpected bonus was finding a Halina A1 twin-lens reflex medium-format camera from the late 50s/early 60s… it had a spool of film inside which I wound on.
Now I’d thought about doing MF back in December, even going so far as to working out if I could afford a second-hand Bronica ETRS camera outfit, and I’d decided I would eschew the 645 format in favour of jumping straight to square 6×6 (being a substantial move from plain 35mm so I figured I’d appreciate it more). Dale Photographic in Leeds had a Hasselblad I coveted, but spending £1500 on a MF film setup rather than getting a family holiday wasn’t going to endear me to Nicky so I left it for a while. However, the whole MF thing was still bimbling in the back of my mind, and finding the Halina was timely.
I worked out a short workflow to see how it would fare – heck, I didn’t even know if it was light-tight. Thoughts of light-meters led to the brainwave of downloading one from the App Store for my iPhone (perhaps a bit of cheating, others may say ingenuity!). It hardly made a noise when the shutter activated I wasn’t even sure it was working and spent ten minutes exploring to make sure! So far so good.
The next day I wandered round the streets of Headingley with the Halina and a fresh roll of Ilford FP4+ 120-roll film. Colleagues at work were curious. I scared the living daylights out of some poor lady in St Michaels Cemetery in Headingley taking photos of gravestones (sorry missus!). Once back at home out came the dev tanks and (after following this tutorial on YouTube on loading 120 film into the Paterson tank) I ended up with some perfectly passable 6×6 medium-format negatives. The images were a lot sharper than I’d anticipated, having seen reports that this particular camera was favoured by the lomography crowd because of its soft focus – hooray!
Into the scanner. Set the controls. Forgot I set them for 35mm and of course MF has larger negs so I ended up with a gigapixel image – Lightroom struggled over it and Flickr hated it, so eventually settled on 4800dpi, 95% JPEG, 4-pass-plus-IR out of Vuescan. Here are the results (click backwards to see more I took that day) – banal subject matter but I’m very very pleased how they’ve turned out! Wonderful square high-contrast images which would make perfect album covers!
As a sidenote, you remember I mentioned that exposed film in the Halina? Purely on a whim I developed it. It was a Kodak X-Pro film (I think) and thought there wouldn’t be any harm in giving it a shot – but the bloomin’ thing dev’d fine and after scanning I saw the face of my Great-Grandfather staring at me. Blimey – I didn’t actually think almost 40 year-old film would process properly (nor had I really worked out timing for the dev tank, I just left it for 7ish minutes in Microphen). Ellie was fascinated, and we’re soliciting family members to try and date it as it’ll give us an idea when the camera was last used!
Anyway, as I left you in my last blog entry tonight I’m heading to another gig, this time to try and shoot a friend’s acoustic act in MF using Ilford HP5 which I intend to push to 1600. How I’ll get on I don’t know – this is a completely manual attempt! Even the practicalities of winding film with only the red-coloured rear window of the camera body may defeat me (given stage lighting) – maybe I should take a torch! I’ll be sure to post the results on my Flickr stream if there are some presentable images, of course.
Not a link to my own father’s pics (you can find those on his Flickr photostream) but instead a link to a blog called My Dad’s Photos, dedicated to photographs taken by the maintainer’s father John Hendy.
I arrived there by following a link to 1973 photos of Kings Road in London, but there are photos from the 1962 Monaco GP and some British Grands Prix from 1958 onwards the Motorsport archive.
It’s a fascinating wade through, especially if you’re an F1 fan and a photographer.
When I was 7 I bought myself a film camera from Wakefield fleamarket – a Halina 35mm camera purchased for £1. I took it all over the place and went through the first couple of films like mad (mostly taking photographs of the sky or the floor because I couldn’t get the hang of the viewfinder). My father was processing film at the time and started loading the occasional spool of B&W in and that’s how I started out in photography… once we’d moved to a larger house he took over the cellar and we did prints too.
Almost 30 years later I’m using digital for my semi-professional work: I carry various Canon pro digital bodies around and a complement of lenses (a partial kit-list is on my Flickr profile), and I post-process using Lightroom on the Mac. An average gig shoot for me results in about 200 photos per act and I pare those down into about 40 or 50 shots for a client, all of which is a far cry from 24 frames on film.
I recently did a contract in Halifax (good lord deliver me) as part of my dayjob. Lunchtime wanderings uncovered a camera shop near the market (Janet Green Photographic, I’d link to a website but they don’t have one) where there was a window full of second-hand photographic kit – everything from mid-1950s medium-format bodies up to low-end digital, and so a germ of an idea formed – get an old film camera and learn to develop my own photos again. I pressed my nose to the glass almost daily in the hope that a suitable camera would be on display. Christmas drew closer, the end of the contract loomed, but less than 2 weeks before I’d be out of the area one appeared in the window for just £29: a Canon EOS 500N, one of the more recent 135 Canon range. I bimbled in and after verifying it would accept my Canon EF lenses I walked out as the proud owner of a film camera body, some chemicals and a few spools of Ilford FP4+ film.
The first thing I noticed was that I was conscious how many photos I wasn’t taking using film. I assumed I’d go through film like wildfire but it took me the best part of 3 days to blow my first 24-exposure film (the second film took a little less time principally because I was out in sunny Halifax getting some gritty industrial images 
). This did make me realise that although I scattergun at gigs I am more inclined to take time to set up a shot elsewhere.
Once home and in the kitchen I mixed up some developer and spent 20 minutes lightproofing the understair cupboard. Every last LED from the wireless base-station, burglar alarm, central heating system got double helpings of gaffer-tape. Hallway lights went off, the cracks around the door stuffed with scarves. Total darkness, hooray. I turned the safelight on, loaded the film into the canister and went off to develop it.
Right. Safelight. Yeah – about that: there’s no safelight for film… I’d forgotten that bit and overexposed it. I had also been using a dodgy thermometer, not that it would have made much difference. The second time I was a lot more careful and some success ensued, having processed a spool of Ilford HP4+ (ISO400) in Ilfosol-3 developer: this resulted in quite a chunky grain which you can see on the Flickr page for the photo. Still, not bad considering I’ve been trying to remember how to do it all based upon vague memories of watching Dad.
As a sidenote: I haven’t been doing any printing, instead using a slide scanner from Maplin to throw the negatives into JPEG files; it’s only a cheap thing with a lamp which shines the slide onto a small CCD and auto-compensates for exposure etc. – the results aren’t very good. This one will do for the moment as long as I put the images through Lightroom, at least until I find a USB slide scanner I’m happy with.
Subsequently I walked into Halifax and blew off a spool of Ilford FP4+ (ISO100) – you can see the results here including some self-portraits taken on long-lapse outside Dean Clough Mills at dawn and dusk; I think the contrast on them is quite nice. I haven’t tried pushing the film yet, I’m taking baby-steps and since Christmas I’ve been using it as an occasional ‘grab camera’ to play with rather than anything serious.
Most of my supplies are coming from Amazon marketplace sellers (RK Photographic are sending me most of it including a black bag, a load of FP4+ and a film spool opener). Locally Dale Photographic in Leeds sells chemicals and film which is useful in an emergency and if anyone wants to buy me a present they have a secondhand Hasselblad MF 6×6 120-roll camera with a couple of lenses for £1500… thought not!
Tonight though the 500N gets a proper run at a gig using Ilford Delta 3200 film (ISO3200) which I will probably process using Microphen developer later on in the week and post to my Flickr stream. I’m hoping to replicate some of the more iconic Kev Cummins film shots from the early 80s – somehow doing colour-to-B&W in Lightroom feels like cheating and I’m hopeful of good results. At least I don’t have to worry about red/yellow saturation 
(The photo is me aged 8 with the Halina – my Dad took it when we went on a photowalk in Wakefield; the courtyard is round the back of the old Post Office, and it’s now known as ‘The Latin Quarter’.)
Update: Julian (aka @liquidsquid on Twitter) said that this was his idea. If I’m going to be perfectly honest it was discussions with quite a few folks which led to this, not least @leica0000, @john2755 and my landlady in Milton Keynes towards the end of last year who gave me a box full of old Patterson developing kit. That said, the Delta3200 was definitely Julian’s idea.
So in what is now an annual event, once more I plonked myself behind the camera taking photos in Santa’s grotto at Wrenthorpe Primary School (previous instalments are documented from from 2009 and 2008).
Refresher: it entailed taking pics of Santa and kids after they’d just got their gifts. The ‘grotto’ is a little side-room with ‘fireplace’ and obligatory sled full of toys, and a sideroom where I hid until required to take pics plus the computer operator could sit to print the images. The first time we did it there were about 180 pics and around 250 kids so it’s not something to be done lightly.
This year I repeated last year’s setup with one important change: Adobe Lightroom 3 now has a ‘tethering’ feature. This means you can plug your camera direct into the computer with a USB cable, take a pic and LR3 will process and make available the photo immediately; the new print function also enables two pics to be selected and I can immediately slap two 6×4 photos on one piece of A4 with all colour modifications. Much quicker, and lots less messing around.
I had a willing assistant in Alex, a lovely lass who’d never used a Mac or LR3 but still cottoned onto the process pretty quickly. I reckon that with a little practice I could probably do it all on my own, really.
The other (minor) change was in the off-body aerial flashgun. I used a 420ex last year on a stand with a remote trigger, but this year used a 250W strobe with an umbrella. Slightly less harsh, lots more control over intensity.
(I love Lightroom 3, it makes life so much easier…)
While I’m doing less contract work, I’ve been concentrating on taking snaps…
Alongside photographing such luminaries as Miles Hunt (from 90s band The Wonderstuff), former drug-lord Howard Marks, and the usual local Wakefield bands I’ve starting touting myself around as a more general event photographer; after all, I need the cash and I’m not too bad at it (he said, modestly). I’ve got the kit from here-and-there: a few months ago I acquired a small portraiture lighting kit comprising 3 x 250W strobes (with modelling lights), umbrellas, softboxes and stands. I also managed to blag a 3-metre backdrop stand and a couple of used backdrops – well I say used, the black one is still in its wrapper and brand new as far as I can tell! I’ve had a bit of practice and assistance from my old mucker Neal Lewis on strobism plus reading up on techniques in various tomes such as Light Science & Magic and the results aren’t half bad.
I’ve also been asked to do my first few weddings, so have quoted for those: no prints, just CD, but you get around 250 photos in a candid style (no, I’m not doing freebies but nice of you to ask )
A week or two back I found myself photographing Leeds Guide Retail Therapy Awards 2010, the first awards ceremony I’ve done and an amusing experience herding drunk award-winners around the stage to get some photos (I’d link directly to them here but they’re embargoed until tomorrow). This sorta ties into the thought that in order to be a photographer of people (weddings, portraiture, events, etc.) you really need to be assertive as a person and be able to easily gel with folks, which I think I’m probably reasonably OK at. Client seems happy anyway, and I think there’ll be some in the print edition of Leeds Guide which comes out tomorrow (Weds 10 Nov 2010).
In any case, it’ll help top up the coffers and pay for the insane electricity bill which British Gas seem to have decided to send us. Idiots.
The dust has settled now, and Photocamp Bradford {2010} was ace. I got there a bit late I think owing to a rather slow bus and various Fotopic-related shenanigans but managed to find various friends and acquaintances for a coffee beforehand.
After Jon’s initial ‘welcome’ wibbling in the main theatre, we were treat to a talk by Joe Cornish and Tim Parkin on landscape photography. Useful session and I learned quite a bit about using neutral density gradient (ND grad) filters. It’s a bit of a departure from my own photography to have the luxury to set up a shot laboriously, and mitigate sunlight/sky; when my own set of Cokin P filters arrives I’ll give it a bit of a go I think perhaps up at Brimham Rocks or something.
Then lunch – overpriced baked potato in the café but still more chatting with fellow photographers – and I wandered upstairs to set up my own talk on gig photography (slides are here). A good session as far as I was concerned as well as being a useful little experiment in connecting the iPad to a projector with Keynote (the drawback being you need a really long VGA cable so I’ll be carrying an extension around with me in the future!). We didn’t have time for the full talk and ended up glossing through photographer etiquette, self-promotion and stuff, but I’m going to repeat the talk with a bit more time. More about that in a mo.
Once I’d packed away I wandered off to the street photography session but was a bit bored and came out halfway through – nothing new to learn really.
The session I think I got quite a lot out of was Ed Waring’s talk on wedding photography. He takes more of a candid approach which matches my own style and as a direct result of that session I’ve decided to start doing weddings if people ask; I especially liked his method of discussing with the bride and groom, and not being afraid to say ‘I’m not the photographer for you’ rather than chase the pennies all the time.
I stopped for a drink afterwards but didn’t hit the Sunday session as I was doing a gig in the evening.
Ah yes, the gig photography talk… I’ve decided to repeat the seminar/discussion but will have a bit more time and will be making it a little more hands-on, and it takes place upstairs at The Hop, Wakefield on Sunday 21st November. Although it’s free you do need to book in advance so I know how many are coming and get an idea of target audience. You can find out more on my own website at www.joel.co.uk/gigtalk where there’s also a booking form to fill out.
Tomorrow is Photocamp Bradford {2010}, the annual ‘unconference’ for photographers where sessions are part-seminar, part-discussion, part-talk/presentation, all sorts of things. Last year was a lot of fun and I met a lot of Flickr-ers, and I learned tons of stuff. It takes place at Bradford Media Museum (formerly known as the Museum of Film, Photography & Television), and includes talks and access to the museum’s curators, etc.
So this year I’ve volunteered to run a session on gig photography – not just techniques but also how I got into it in the first place, breaks which worked, essentials to keep in the bag, kit, etiquette, and post-processing. I’m aiming for it to be about 50% talk, 50% discussion so my slides will be starter-points for discussion rather than me standing up preaching at everyone. The session will be about an hour long and is pencilled in just after lunch; as with all unconferences though it’s subject to a bit of change – I hope I don’t clash with any other sessions I want to see such as the wedding session and the landscape session from the headliner speakers.
There are still a few tickets available – go to the Photocamp Bradford {2010} website and follow the links through, you can buy them from the museum in-person too.
(Yes, I should have blogged about this earlier but it’s not really been that high a priority for me given I’ve been up to my gills in work. Sorry.)
Nowadays, I take a lot of photos in a shoot – probably about 500 at a minimum, but more likely a few thousand if I’m on-site for more than an hour or so. Gig photography mandates this a bit and in the more extreme venues you can end up ‘scattergunning’. As I carry the EOS 5D Mark II and shoot in full RAW it’s inevitable that a shoot will eat up at least a 16GB memory card (probably a lot more) so I need stacks of memory cards for when I’m out on the road and can’t process the photos in a hurry.
Browsing around I happened upon 7dayshop.com. I’ve picked up some cheap flash memory from them in the past (2GB no-name SD cards for the DAB radio and the kids’ cameras) which was fine, so splashed out on a few 32GB Kingston Elite Pro CF cards. The first big shoot after they arrived was Pride London 2010: in previous years I ate up 70GB just shooting JPEG, this year shooting RAW it was going to be utter carnage on the memory side – we’re talking at least 25MB an image here.
(I also bought a Vosonic digital wallet with a 500GB hard disk in it, useful for dumping off photos if I ran out or in case of unexpected issues – I’m quite glad I did that, in hindsight.)
During the course of the day, the Kingston cards performed well. Slow to write but you don’t expect blistering speeds for a penny shy of £60, and the occasional check in review mode showed the images were writing nicely. Simon (who was photographing with me) began running out of CF, and he’d obtained some 16GB Kingston cards so I offered to dump the images onto the Vosonic; we sat down for a quick pint while they copied, the Vosonic chugged through the first few then reported a corruption of the card! Er, what? The images were fine on the back of the camera, we checked again. It was stumbling on one pic so Si deleted it off using the camera, we tried again. It chugged through, then stumbled on a different image. Uh oh. I can’t remember what we did then – probably switched to another card or I lent Si one, I honestly don’t know. Either way, that was the first sign the Kingston cards weren’t up to scratch.
Fast forward to post-shoot when I started dumping images onto my laptop. 32GB of images from one of the Kingston cards and it seemed the computer didn’t recognise it using my USB card-reader – I panicked a little, and connected the camera up directly to the laptop… where it read fine. Phew, but still worrying. I tried it with another reader (I’ve got several card-readers) and all of them exhibited the same behaviour with this particular 32GB card: will read in the camera directly, won’t read on anything else.
One of the 16GB CF cards began showing the same symptoms last week, in the middle of a shoot in Hull. Popped it into the Vosonic where it refused to completely read the card and I ended up using Cardrescue to get the images back. Another pit-of-the-stomach moment, one I can do without.
Since then I’ve done a bit of digging and asking around – three friends are reporting that the cheap Kingston cards cause issues for them, and a discussion on a maillist yielded a link to criticism of Kingston’s MicroSD cards and another FAQ on Kingston CF compatibility. It all points to Kingston rebranding cheap cards and using new microcontrollers from about 2009 onwards which perhaps don’t meet with the electrical specifications demanded by the CF interface.
Needless to say I won’t be buying Kingston again, and now I have about 80GB of CF cards I don’t trust. An expensive mistake, but not as expensive as if I’d lost a shoot completely (I’ve since replaced the Kingston cards with Sandisk and verified they are genuine).
Last weekend was Pride London 2010; once again we’d been asked if we could take photos for Paleday and The Pink Singers on the main stage, once again a privilege to do so.
Given last year’s experiences of schlepping to and fro from Battersea I thought it prudent to get down the day before and stay at a hotel somewhere in central London. We’d had plenty of notice this year and I booked Covent Garden Travelodge: pretty reasonable for our needs and easy for transport links. You don’t expect luxury at Travelodges, just a good night’s sleep so this provided all we needed.
So anyway, we got down on the Friday. After a bit of confusion I collected our Press passes from backstage in Trafalgar Square then wandered up to Camden for a lovely evening with friends (especially nice to meet Jharda again, and have unexpected company from Richie).
We were told that this year we were to have not just passes but also wristbands which I needed to collect from King’s Cross before the parade started. This meant a bit of a mad dash for me while Nicky and Si headed for the parade itself. Bad timing for the weekend – I was naffed off to discover the entire Circle line was shut down for maintenance which in turn led to various bus rides to Baker Street simply trying to get there before the parade started! Good news, I managed it (with just quarter of an hour to spare), making my way to the head of the parade led by Boris Johnson and Peter Tatchell.
There were a lot of photographers at the head of the parade – when it started we were moved back. Unfortunately (and this is my first experience of such behaviour) there were a couple of photographers who didn’t take any notice and started to spoil it for the rest of us conscientious lot; one photog was threatened with removal of his pass, and another idiot almost came to blows with a Parade Director. I strongly believe that there’s unwritten laws of courtesy when you’re a photographer, but this time it was a little… well, nasty I suppose.
I got ahead of the parade and started grabbing shots of the crowds of which there were enough to keep me going. At one point I turned back to see I was about 20 metres in front of the head of the parade, nothing in front of me and nothing behind me; at either side were thousands of cheering screaming people. Yes, it would seem I led the parade (pic here). Hurrah!
It soon became apparent we had a bit of an issue – how do we drop back into the parade to take shots of participants given all the photographers are being shoved back? Si and Nicky managed to do this by blending into the crowd while the parade flag went past, but I was skeptical of this given I’d got two huge cameras around my neck. I slipped out and walked with the spectators on Oxford Street while the first few floats went past, then found a steward near a break in the barriers.
“Can I get in the parade please?” I wibbled, after getting his attention. “I’m Press, meant to be over there. Sorry.”
“Um no. We can’t part the barriers.”
“Bother. I’m really meant to be photographing.”
He thought for a moment and grinned slightly. “Right, you could climb over?”
So I handed him the larger camera and lens, and vaulted the barrier with about £3k-worth of camera kit. I won’t repeat that experience but at least I was in the parade!
I walked with lots of floats – the London Gay Men’s Chorus, the LGBT Lib Dems, Labour and Tory groups, various campaign groups, and the London Raiders softball team – all the while taking photos (many of which are on my Flickr stream, all of which are on photos.jml.net). I was sorry to miss Gaz (who was apparently in Soho Square), the Gaydar lot, and one of the Pinkies I’ve been talking with since I photographed him last year. Never mind, there’s always the 2011 parade!
Post-parade, Si and Nicky were waiting for me with a nice chilled pint in The Sherlock Holmes pub just off Trafalgar Square. Recovery time, a good sit down. Phew.
Next stop – the main stage. I arrived to find one of the performers from West End show ‘Wicked’ singing her little heart out, and it was at that point I discovered that this year our passes and wristbands didn’t just get us into the press pit but it also got us backstage. Bonus!
The stage was higher this year, by my estimation about 18″. This meant the angles were a lot sharper on some of the photos, but the press pit was also larger. Unfortunately, it was also a lot more full and there was quite a lot of shoving around – unfortunate. Some of the acts were pounced on by the photographers (including for some reason the cast of the West End show ‘Hair’) while others didn’t get touched and my philosophy in such situations is that I’d prefer to get photos other people don’t, so step back. Instead I took photos of acts waiting to go onstage, little bits of interaction between performers and producers, photos nobody else would get. Given some of the reactions so far, it was appreciated.
Anyway, back to the day. After a while, myself and Si went for a wander to see what the Leicester Square stage was like. Crowded, lots of people around. Some good shots taken, quite nice, and we got the (now usual) kick out of being able to walk through the exit and go out of the entrance cos we had press passes, baby! 
We fought our way up through Soho, to find there was nothing in Soho Square – not even many paraders. We took a few snaps (for that is all they were) and set off back.
At that point, I received a text message from Nicky: “Pink Singers all lining up”. SHIT, THIS IS THE BAND I’M HERE TO PHOTOGRAPH AND I’M STILL UP IN SOHO. We run as fast as we can through seething masses of people. We got to the main stage to find that yes, they’d all lined up but weren’t on for about another 30 minutes. Thanks for panicking me, love! Still, it left me backstage to take some more candid shots – excellent.
Paleday and the Pink Singers were wonderful – a better performance than last year, and I’m looking forward to Paleday doing some more full gigs.
And so we went on into the evening, with the final act being the DE Experience, a drag act performing most frequently at the Vauxhall Tavern. Lots of photos, lots of crowd shots, some opportunity to mess with the fisheye lens. It all finished up around 8:30pm so we headed back to the hotel.
(My t-shirt went down well – I’d opted for a red number with JAN MOIR THINKS I’M DIRTY printed on it. I got stopped a few times for people to take my photo, and met someone professing to be involved with the Daily Mail who said ‘don’t worry mate, we f*ing hate her too’. Comedy.)
Finally after half an hour of rest, showering, etc. we’re ready for a night out in Soho. That was a bit of a mess really, the whole place seemed to shut down about 11:30pm, maybe because of the broken glass? There were police everywhere and unless we wanted to go in a very very crowded club (Koko anyone?) we’d be out of luck. So, we strolled back to the hotel and in a display of middle-classed heterosexuality we had a few bottles of Carlsberg until the hotel bar closed. Meh.
There were about 80GB of photos this time round – a smaller number in total but I was shooting RAW and dumping them to a Vosonic Imagetank to prevent running out of CF (instead I ran out of juice on the BP511 batteries on the Canon 30D). I was carrying the 24-105mm f/4 IS L lens, the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lens and the f/2.8 fisheye (using it as an ultrawide on the 30D body at times). It seemed a good mix, and was supplemented sometimes by the Speedlite 580EX II flashgun to provide fill.
My photos are gradually appearing on my Flickr stream and over at our photo gallery.