The photographers on site had a real challenge – night time racing – really really bright lights and moving subjects.  Not easy.  Joolze Dymond was shooting on behalf of the organisers and the BCF and she had some creative approaches to her shots.  I approve.

Have a browse through or bookmark the site for future reference, it’s worth a few minutes of your time.

Once we built and lit the set it was a relatively simple process to prepare the next pudding, position it and shoot it.  The setup process cost us two or three puddings to get get right.  After that, we romped through them.  A bit of post-processing  and these are the finished articles:

A side-benefit was that there were a lot of puddings left over – Paul brought bulk packs to the shoot just in case! – he doesn’t eat them, which is pretty understandable when he ships millions every year!  I took them all home and filled the freezer!  Anyway, it was all worthwhile, Paul emailed me today to organise another shoot!

Oh, make-up artists, we need you too!

Dan and Jez came around last week to try out some lighting setups and have a general evening of camera play, it’s something we started last year as a way of learning and sharing ideas – we even have a Flickr group dedicated to it!  Anyway, Dan had just bought himself a new guitar so brought it along too – it’s metallic black so a real pig to light properly!  We ran out of time before we got that far but I did manage to grab this set of Dan with his new toy.  They’re lit with a single overhead umbrella and the black and white conversion has been done in Lightroom.

Nearly a month into 2009 already and I’m still behind!  I’m finishing up my tax return tomorrow and then catching up on all the left-overs from the Christmas rush. That should allow me to start planning ahead for the first weddings of the season in April.

On a personal note, when I’m not taking photos I’m a cyclist and this year I’ve signed up to ride in the blue ribband mass-participation event in the world – L’Etape du Tour.  It’s basically a mountain stage of this years Tour de France and is attended by 8 or 9000 like-minded crazy bikers!  The stage itself is from Montelimar to the summit of Mont Ventoux in Provence, 108 Miles and over 3000 metres of climbing thrown in.  The Ventoux itself comes at the very end after 92 miles and is basically 16 miles at an average of 7% uphill!  Next weekend my preparation begins in earnest when I’m off down to Ashdown in Kent to ride ‘The Hell of Ashdown‘; a 67 mile sportive with 2000 metres climing (with some gradients of 25%!!).  Next week I’ll really know if I’ve got the form and the legs to tackle L’Etape or if I need to rethink my training!  Sponsorship details to follow…

I’ve just upgraded the ‘engine’ behind this site to WordPress 2.7, it was a smooth and relatively simple process.  The benefits are largely for me, the site is more secure and easier to manage but there’s one thing that 2.7 brings that you may be interested in.

The gallery plugin I use is called NextGen Gallery by a very clever man called Alex Rabe.  With the release of WordPress 2.7 he’s released NextGen Gallery version 1 and with version 1 comes support for PicLens!…

Piclens?  What? If you’ve not discovered it already I’d say have a look, it allows you to browse photos from supported sites like Flickr, Facebook and Picasa web galleries (and mine too!) in a seamless 3D wall that you can scroll with your mouse, no more clicking ‘next, next…’.  Seriously, download it for your browser and check it out; for large photo collections it’s amazing!

Cheers

Todays minor headline about the death of a conjoined twin at Great Ormond Street hospital struck a chord with me.  For those of us unfortunate enough to need their incredible services they hold a special place in our thoughts, when a child is lost I can only wonder how the staff must feel.  They deserve all the plaudits, thanks and recognition they receive, and more besides.

We spent time at GOSH in 2005, thankfully our story has a happy ending.  However, I will never forget those terrible, dark days.  I feel for the parents, and for those that did their level best for the twins but were denied.

It’s not true what they say, we ARE other people and things do happen…

Normal photo related service will be resumed shortly…

For me the busy season is always the run-up to Christmas this year is no different so having the new site all squared away means I can concentrate on the work at hand rather than wondering when I will find the time to ‘sort out the new site’; those of you who know me will know how long this has been knocking around in ‘dev’!

So, onward and upward.  I’ve just come back from a week in Las Vegas (!) with my day-job, visiting VMworld 2008.  The place is a truly unique experience, not one that I want to experience again any time soon, but one that is quite unforgettable…  This weekend coming we have a meet-up for my flickr group, Strobist: Norfolk and Norwich out at Burgh Castle.  We’ve had a pretty quiet summer and it will be good to catch up with people again and hopefully see some new faces.

I’ve got some work to catch up on now that I’m back and the jet-lag is reducing; two sessions from the last three weeks who’ve both been understanding with my work induced delays to their prints.  I’ll sign off now and get cracking with them.

Check back in a few days or sign up for the RSS feed to keep in touch

Cheers!

I guess that’s what I’m hoping to do with this blog – to keep things fresh(er) and give you some food for thought, some ideas for your own shoots and some links to places I’ve found. Also, to give you a flavour of who I am and what makes me tick, to give you the confidence to book me for your special occasion.