Another Busy Weekend

I had a really busy weekend!

Firstly Saturday morning I had a family portrait shoot. The young fella you see in the picture here was one of the stars of the shoot. He was only two weeks old and in fairness was as good as gold and hardly made a squeek. (i'll put up a slide show once the family have seen the images).

It was whilst I was on the way to the portrait shoot I took another call on my mobile from someone I used to work with a long time ago. He'd got married in Florida and was having a small party in the UK tonight, was there any chance .......

So I finally get home at about 2 o'clock on Sunday morning and download the images. Sunday I travelled up to Chesterfield in Derbyshire to meet up with a few photographers. It's nice to sit down with other like minded folk and share ideas and see what the latest gossip is. Several hours of technical and business talk later it was time to come home having made some new friends.

Photoshop Magic

Yesterday was my birthday and a great friend of mine, Emma Duggan kindly made the effort to
come up and see me for the day. Emma's also a professional photographer who has a similar but also differant style to her photography. Emma Kindly bought me the coolest and most perfect birthday card ever (see picture here) how cool is that!

As i'd promised when she arrrived (late as usual) we went to the park and I introduced her to my favourite photography props. We spent a couple of hours feeding and shooting the squirrels.

We had a great laugh and left the park when it started to get dark. We then set about playing with the images in photoshop.

One of my complaints about shooting digitally is how flat the pictures tend to be when they come out of the camera compared to film. Emma showed me some neat quick tricks (look at the differance between the two shots here) to getting the images to wake up which I will now use all the time.

Having sorted out the photoshop we went for an Indian and set the world to rights. I always find when two photographers meet up and start chatting its like nothing else. It's as if you live in a foreign land and you suddenly discover someone else who can speak the same language! Hours and hours of great conversation.

After the meal we went back to my house and started what was supposed to be a little run through on how to use flash, and how to have fun with it. I won't go into too much detail but we ended up at 2 in the morning, with stands, tripods and multiple flash guns scattered throughout the house. We then set ourselves the challenge of working out how to get a person in the same photograph twice in differant positions without photoshop. After many nearly attempts and stumbling around the house in complete darkness between flashes we finally got what we were after. GREAT FUN !!!

Yamaha R1 Launch

Friday night was the official launch of the new Yamaha R1 motor bike. I'm no expert on bikes but judging by the massive turnout of interested people at the John Pease showroom my guess is is going to be pretty popular.

The evening started with wine and sausage rolls with the bike being covered in the showroom. Slowly people began drifiting in untill there was no where to park and the showroom was completely packed out.

Loud music pumped and for the official unveiling smoke and a light show. talking to the people who had come to see the bike i think most were impressed. I heard that a few had placed orders on the night too.

As a job it went well although i'm already sarting to pander over that 12-24mm Nikon lens ..... mmmmmm

No Sleep for Weeks

I think i've drunk more coffee today than I do in a normal year. Today I had a job in London of shooting 4 differant apostrophe coffee shops. I was commisioned by the guy (Dave form Enmasse) who made all the furniture and fittings to travel around and get some images of his work in situ. Many miles via black cab and tube have been covered and I must say its a pleasure to be back home at last.

I treated myself and hired a 12-24mm wide angle lens from the pro centre and i have to admit I think i'm in love. This lens is a very impressive piece of glass, the width was exactly what I needed when working in tight areas. I don't think it will be very long before I invest in this lens.

I heard some GREAT news today! The NFL have agreed to send two teams to Wembley stadium this year to play in a regular season NFL game at the new Wembley stadium. It's not positive who yet, but it will probably be the Miami Dolphins v New York Giants.

Fun on the Ice

This Saturday the Chelmsford chieftains had a home game against the Invicta Dynamos. In case you weren't aware the Chieftains and the Colchester Gladiators (american football club) are sporting partners. As such the Gladiators travelled over (on mass) to support Chelmsford in this cup game. As the official Colchester Gladiators photographer I went along to capture what happened.

The first period was hard fought and very close, however by halfway through the 2nd period the Chieftains had made the game theirs.

After the game the Gladiators along with the Essex Flames cheer leaders were invited onto the ice for some photographs. Not something I've done before photographing on ice, needless to say I didn't venture very far from the barrier in case I went A* over T*.

The other problem was ice hockey players don't tend to be as big as American football players as can be seen in this shot. The ice was so slippy I had a word with the Chieftains general manager afterwards and advised him to put some grit down in case someone slipped ..... I don't think he was too impressed.

In all seriousness it was a great night out and we were felt to be very welcome.