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).