I was called last week by a political Think Tank group Compass for an event photography gig in London at a rally they were holding in parliament to discuss the campaign they are supporting ‘End Legal Loan Sharking’. It was a last minute gig and I had no idea what to expect at all really, which left me with the dilemma of what equipment to bring. The last two events I shot were corporate functions, in poorly lit reception rooms which I shot with a on camera flash and a Honl honeycomb Grid, which I really like for pub/nightclub style shooting. This however was not a nightclub and as you can see from the shot above the room was lit by several large tungsten chandeliers with HUGE ceilings and no surface to bounce a flash off in sight! This meant I was either going to shoot a direct flash diffused or Hi Iso with a fast lens. I shot a few frames with the flash on and really wasn’t happy with the look, plus it was a every intimate environment and the flash popping was annoying. Here is an example of room shot with a 420Ex on ETL and a diffuser at iso 400, F.4 and 125/s with a Ef-S 17-55mm.

I decided to switch lenses and ditch the flash all together. I screwed on the trusty 50mm 1.4 and cranked up the iso to 800 + and felt much more free to room the room and capture the speakers. I usually shoot concerts with the 50mm and set the focus to ‘spot’ this way you can use the in – house lighting to full effect and shoot on shutter priority with a low F stop.

The above shots were shot using the 50mm at iso 800 F 1.8 and F2, 60/s and 80/s – the problem when you are in a dimly lit room and shooting like this is the inevitable camera shake. There was no room for a tripod in the area (and I didn’t bring one either) so it’s all deep breathing and holding on tight to the camera! Overall though I was unhappy with a lot of the shots I ended up with and also feel constrained using a 50mm prime at 1.4 – its a tight crop on my 40D and shooting from a distance at 1.4 I find myself either focusing manually or hastilly adjusting focus points so as to get the subject sharp and not those objects in between!

The client was happy with the results so not complaints but I decided to do some reading on this type of shooting to see if there were any tips I could pick up. Enter trusty Joe Mcnally his article on how to hold a camera was a huge help. Even though I shoot right eyed I found that I could use this grip perfectly in this type of situation (for landscape at least!). Basically he uses his left shoulder as a monopod and it really does eliminate a lot of movement in the camera, combine this with a short burst of shots (I stick with 3) and you are going to have A LOT sharper images. Here is the grip demonstrated.

So the following Thursday when I got another last minute event photography call to shoot for Compass yet again. I wanted to try out these new techniques. Once again it was a low lit room with very little room to manoeuvre.

I used the Canon 17-55mm Lens for 90% of the night (it’s such a sharp lens, when I can afford to move up to a full frame body I will miss it!) and when shooting landscape used the new technique and found it really comfortable and YES the shots did look sharper. The evening was also really intersting with a lecture by Professor David Marquand (below), Ed Milliband and Caroline Lucas (leader of the Greens). The shot below was taken at Iso 400 F.4 and 40/fs.

I would love to hear what other photographers out there have to say about event photography and how to tackle it.

The last photo from the event is Ed Milliband

Last summer we decided to grow a few potted plants on our humble balcony. We had just moved into out ground floor ex-council flat and did not know the area or its inhabitants. We started growing late and did not venture outside the balcony. Google street view has a great shot of the top of our tomato plant search SW11 2UB .

This year I wanted more…A year deep and we had become happy inhabitants of the estate, the kids all know my name and don’t mess with our balcony -and a very cold long winter’s worth of  River Cottage had be fiending to grow from seed and  make use of all the barren soil lying around the Bridlington house estate.

There is literally acres of perfectly good soil covered in weeds all over the estates of South West London. Why no-body bothers to plant on them I have no idea. I had initially decided to plant some spinach under the Cherry tree in front ouf our balcony. What started as a few humble spinachi seeds has turned into a daily job watering: 3 varieties of potato, fennel, beetroot, cabbage, leeks, pak choi, two varieties of Zuchini (courgette) 3 varieties of tomato, chilli, 2 kinds of peppers, a whole assortment of herbs, dwarf beans, red and white onions, carrots and a colourful splattering of marigolds weaving in and between.

Having read Nigel Slaters ‘tender’ I was convinced I would need to do all sorts of things to the soil to make the seeds grow… I decided to forget that knowledge and mulch the stuff up with some home base potting mix and compost and plant away. 3 months later and we are eating amazingly fresh pak choi and cabbage with super sweet baby yellow Zuchini…. I just wish I had more time and space… I could potter around shirtless with a beer in the garden all day!!! The London Summer has been very helpfull as well…. Enjoy the shots of our slice of paradise amidst the 60′s estates high rise’s of Clapham Junction

This is the view from the balcony (see the first shot with me surveying my bounty…)

Pak Choi grown from seed directly in the soil. 8 weeks in and its almost ready to eat! Just have to get to it before the bug world.

Since April I have been digging out more and more of the lot in front of our flat.. Half of it was huge rocks and old roots, time consuming to clear but also highly satisfying.Towards the end I found this brick structure which I decided to use as a planter for a Tomato plant… So far so good.

Cabbage grown from seed which just took offf. It getting devoured by snails and the like now.. We aren’t using any insecticide etc… So they are very happy! Next tot hat is Fennel also grown from seed which was slow to take off but is looking good and strong now!

Baby Beets…….

I bough a bunch of sprouting maris piper spuds from homebase for 50P I pretty much thought they woudlent grow and planted them haphazardly about ten minutes before I flew out to Budapest. When I returned there were sprouts coming from every where. I though they were weeds initially – now the bloody things are almost chest high!!!! We shall be eating some very fresh potatoes come the end of summer… Next to that is one of our courgette plants which we have dubbed Audrey II we now have an Audrey III which is even bigger and more beastly!

A bounty of green and the perfect way to ingest them!!!!!!!! (that’s leftover sea bass from Billingsgate)

We are not planning on sticking out another whole Summer in London – but if we do next year I will be taking over more and more of the Estate.. All the old ladies across the road love us and our garden, even the neighbours are throwing less ciggie buts into our lot!!! The local council should take heed and make it a project to get kids involved in planting and growing their own food!

For anyone living in London, set your alarm and get up early to see this, even if you dont like fish it’s worth going for the spectacle, people from every continent pawing through an amazing selection of very fresh fish!!! You can even buy whole Barramundi for £6 a kilo!!!!

Check out Victoria’s Sponges website or their facebook page

Here is a little (visual) taste!!!!

And this panorma off my 40D with my crappy 24-105 lens…. Was a perfect sunset spot on a bluff near the old town in Dubrovnik, good times!

I recently purchased this Olympus SP 35 off of Welsh photographer Melanie Davies (no relation) . I have been dreaming about a Leica Range finder lately but can’t afford decent beer let alone extremely overpriced vintage camera equipment . I was however fairly excited to get a good deal on this little gem.  Sporting a 42mm 1.7 lens with reportedly good optics and a spot focus meter the 35 SP was something of a pioneer in its day being one of the only Rangefinders with the spot focus and also full auto mode. I was planning on writing a full post about it after my trip to Hungry and Croatia but though it best that I at least run a roll of film through it and check that the damn thing is working, I have heard the meter can go. I chucked in a roll of Fugi Superia 200 and was basically planning on bracketing through the F stops to check the meters accuracy. While I was shooting my new BBQ/Garden I saw that the sun was blazing into the horizon and bolted down to the river……

The results were much more than I had anticipated, on a fairly cheap, low saturation film the 35 proved that not only is the meter very accurate in Auo mode and Manual but that the lens is a great little piece of glass… I have loaded up on 35mm for this trip.. More shots to come……

(all shots are straight off the negs scanned in at a fairly low res)

I had a shoot arranged yesterday for a play Kara Peters is putting on later this year called ‘A Midsummer Eve’s Dream’. We had planned on shooting the character Puck played by Timothy John Pritchett in the cinematic Brompton Cemetery. About an hour before the shoot I realised that my Yongnuo rf-602 flash trigger had stopped triggering. For £30 and a 99% trigger rate even at good distance I can’t really complain about 10 months of good use, still an hour before a shoot is fairly inconvenient.

On the other hand the sun was shining for a change in London so I could probably get by without the strobes. The idea was to shoot the Puck in character for a poster being used to secure the venue for the play. Puck in mythology is a mischievous fiend, we wanted to try and capture some of that but in this particular play he will be the MC, so we wanted him to have a strong presence in the final image.

I had initially planned on cutting the sun with the strobes and having a high contrast shot of Puck emerging from the trees, with the triggers out of the picture (and no pc port on my 420 Ex) my only option would be to trigger the sb-28 with the 420 on camera or ditch the strobes all together bring out the trusty reflector and use the biggest strobe of them all…

Pinkney (Kara’s cousin) was along as stylist/photographer, while we were setting up a shot she took a few snaps of Kara jumping off some stairs which we thought we should try with Puck (below). While looking cool it didn’t really capture the essence of the character or the play which is what we were going for.

We then moved up into the building behind the jumping shot and played with the great shards of light coming in from the west. We eventually got this shot of Puck contorting which we used for the final poster (below).

Even though the I couldent use the flashes off camera, I had a great team to help me hold the reflector and keep an eye on Pucks hair/make-up, which is something I always tend too overlook while shooting and worrying about shutter speeds and framing etc.

We spent a lovely Sunday afternoon shooting headshots for London based NY actress Kara Peters. Blakes and my mate Copley helped out with the shoot which ended up being crashed by a bunch of cross dressing wrestlers…. as they often do!  Enjoy….

I wasn’t joking about the cross dressers!

A few years ago a mate who was clearing his life of material possessions handed me a beat up looking ‘old camera. This was when I was just getting seriously into photography and had bought my Canon 35mm SLR. I looked at the old camera and appreciated its age and obscure shape but never really thought any more about it. It somehow managed to survive three moves across London in various cardboard boxes and a few months back watching a Dean Collins lighting DVD and listening to him sing the praises of old medium format cameras, it ‘clicked’ that I in fact OWNED an old medium format camera.

I did some research (which included about a thousand obligatory flickR self portraits in mirrors with the Rollei in full view) and found out that if this camera was actually in good nick physically (which it most certainly is NOT) it would still fetch a fair bit on ebay…. I grabbed myself some 125 black n white and after happily finding out that the film loaded smoothly and the knobs all seemed to turn I set about exposing some prints!

I was sure that every frame would come back either full white or black, light leaking into he back of the camera or a broken shutter… I got them processed for £8 in 4 hours at Castle foto, Old Street and was pleasantly surprised to see that the thing works! Not the greatest bunch of shots on this first roll but exposing without a light meter is a pretty vague science and I am looking forward to spooling on a few more rolls!

In this digital age of instant everything it feels special to hold a machine made in the ruins of the Third Reich Fifty Five years ago and to feel that eager anticipation for the negatives to come out of the solution to bring to life an image you crafted with a few knobs and a reversed viewfinder!

London is the type of city which is big and dynamic enough to keep continually surprising you. I have been here for just over 3 years now and in that time have shifted between love and hate and all shades of grey in between. At times it feels like a gigantic mess of blank faces rushing about with their heads in the sand and then you find a perfect little shop you hadn’t seen before or a building which is hidden by the present but dates back to the times Musashi was swinging swords in Japan…

Whenever I travel, especially if solo, I spend the first few days somewhere new heading in no particular direction, buying the local beer/wine/whatever from corner stores as I go and walk untill I am thoroughly lost/drunk. I always find that this gives me a really good street-view of the city and how it breathes…

Using Maps and following tourist trails clouds your head with too much ‘direction’.. You are constantly heading somewhere and when you get there you tick it off the list and head somewhere else. Heading nowhere in particular with no time constraints opens up the city and lets you blend into the shadows, wide eyed and keen to pick up all the nuances and back alleys you would have otherwise by-passed on your mad rush to get to St Pauls before the crowds or to line up and pay £30 for a giant carnival ride….

….So a few weeks ago after a long day’s video shoot in Liverpool Street (for www.undergroundcookeryschool.com – more to follow) I decided to buy a few cans of K and take a stroll through the City, a stroll which ended up taking 4 hours from The Gherkin all the way back to Wandsworth….

As far as I’m concerned, Cities  themselves, are the carnival and you just have to get on board….