I posted previously about the current campaign by MP Austin Mitchell to highlight the problems photographers are having from the police & other bodies preventing us taking photographs in public.

I’d written to my MP about the matter who question the Home Office & supplied details from them to me.

My MP said he was also writing to the local chief constable & would update me when he had a reply. I got that reply yesterday. In it my MP enclosed a copy of the letter he received from our local chief constable which included the following:

“I can confirm that there is no legislation prohibiting the taking of photographs in public places by private individuals or groups. There are no local restrictions enforced by us anywhere in the county. Of course, I cannot speak for individual schools or other organisations, which may have their own policies in relation to child protection or the like.“

So I now have a copy of this letter which I will keep with my photography gear in the (unlikely) event that someone tries to stop me taking photos in public.

So, on the whole a hats-off & thanks to my local MP who has taken my concerns & done something about  it.

You can see Austin Mitchell’s Early Day Motion >> here <<

One of the most impressive units at the Festival were the Romans. The detail of the uniforms & equipment is fantastic.

The Romans brought their Centurions & Auxiliaries together with half a dozen cavalry & they did a full demonstration in the arena of marching & tactics, together with demos of weapons & their specialist Roman Artillery. The cavalry swords look pretty sharp judging by the way that apple has been sliced in two!

One of the most incongruous sites of the day was when the Romans went up to view the World War I trench. You can see the trench in the background of the shot of the Centurion Officer.

One of the largest sections in the History Festival was groups representing the World War Two arena.

Apart from many different units there was a large battle re-enactment which involved some paratroopers (Black Knights Army Display Team) landing on D-Day & assisting French Partisans before the British Army arrived. They were attacked by two German Messerschmitt 108s (representing the Me 109s) which were then seen off by a genuine Spitfire which saw action on D-Day itself in 1944.

Groups of many nations were represented. We saw many different groups of Americans & British units, together with some German, but also one or two units of Russians.

The following 3 shots are of German troops from the 2/Pz.Aufkl.Abt.Grossdeutschland – a German Armoured Reconnaissance Unit.

The Living History camps were detailed & realistic with tons of genuine WWII weapons & equipment.

The Russian Solders below are from the 2nd Guards Rifle Division.

Incidentally, during the main battle display, one of the paratroopers ‘chutes failed. Luckily he was able to release it & deploy the reserve parachute. I have no idea whether this was a genuine problem or staged, but unfortunately, I was shooting one of the other paratroopers so didn’t actually catch that moment.

On Sunday my family went up to the Festival of History at Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. It’s run by English Heritage with which I’ve been a member for over 20 years.

The event is all about living history & there are many re-enactment groups who put on static displays. Many of them also had displays in the arenas showing mock battles, marching & drill displays, jousting, etc.

There was around two thousand years of history represented by the thousands of participants from Romans, Normans & Saxons, up through the medieval period, English Civil War, Boer War & both World Wars.

I ended up taking just over 800 shots. I ran out of time & didn’t get many of the groups & periods there.

I was struck my the involvement of the participants. It was interesting to see people so involved in a hobby as expensive, if not more, as mine. The basic uniform & kit for a World War II soldier can be well in excess of £1,000 & that’s just the personal items. Some people have tanks! And the knowledge of detail in their chosen period these guys have is incredible, many are experts in their field.

My chosen task for the day was to take shots depicting the people & equipment in their natural surroundings. This mean shots which didn’t include members of the public looking round the displays, battlefield photos which didn’t include speakers, fences, hot dog stands etc.; not as easy as it sounds given the thousands of visitors. I think I did OK & came away with lots of stuff I’m really happy with. (although in a few shots I had to clone out a plastic carrier bag or the roof of a caravan in a nearby field)

Many of the shots are pseudo-HDR. That is High Dynamic Range processing but with a single exposure rather than several shots taken at different exposure levels. I think it gives them a more gritty look. Some of the shots have had the colour desaturated to add to the overall feel of the photos.

Here you can see the difference between my normal processing & the processing for many of the shots taken at Kelmarsh.

More shots to follow.

Having suffered the disappointment of the cancellation of the RIAT 2008 Airshow, I decided to drive down to Portsmouth to see what I could find. The main reason for choosing Portsmouth was that my wife & daughter had been there earlier in the wee to check out Portsmouth University. They recommended Gunwharf Quay where the Spinnaker Tower is situated.

I had borrowed a Lowepro Camera Rucksack for the weekend, intending to use it at Fairford, & took it with me to Portsmouth. I usually just use a normal rucksack & pile all the gear inside, so the Lowepro was a welcome chance, I actually found it quite comfortable.

I spent most of the day around Gunwharf Quay, taking shots of & around the Spinnaker Tower. Most of the shots are HDR (High Dynamic Range) & were made in Photomatix from 3 shots taken at different exposures. The best way to do this is to taek different exposures on a tripod so the shots can be later matched identically together in Photomatix. I didn’t have a tripod so I used the AEB (Auto Exposure Balance) setting in my Canon 20D Menu Setup.

Basically, you select the AEB setting and then dial in your exposure setting, in the case of these shots I dialled in settings of 1 & 1/3 f-stops difference. This sets up the camera to take a shot at the correct exposure, 1 shot underexposed by 1 1/3 f-stops & the third shot overexposed by 1 1/3 f-stops. If you have the camera on single shot mode then the next three shots you take will be at these 3 different exposures. The best solution, to minimise camera movement between shots is to have the camera on continuous shooting. This way the when you hold the shutter down it will take exactly 3 shots at the 3 different exposures. You won’t eradicate movement between exposures but you will minimise it by taking (in the 20D’s case) the 3 shots in 3/5 of a second.

I think you either love HDR or hate it. I like it. It’s especially good with overcast skies & turns them into really moody shots.

I wandered around the dockyards for a while & took a few shots of HMS Victory.

After finishing up at Portsmouth, I went up onto a hill outside the town for some landscape shots overlooking the town & the bay & then went across to Gosport to take some shots of the Spinnaker Tower from the other side of the bay.

Here is part two of the shot I took up at Silverstone on the F1 testing days on 26th June, prior to the British Grand Prix.

Kimi Raikkonen

Lewis Hamilton

David Coulthard

Fernando Alonso

Nick Heidfeld

And just to finish off here are a couple of non-F1 shots, the first is of a Ferarri taken through the fence & the second is of the stairs leading up into the stands which I thought made a cool graphical image.

Posted under Photo Shoots

I’d popped down to Wiltshire for RIAT 2008 (an airshow that didn’t happen) & stayed on a little campsite at the back of a pub just outside Pewsey.

On the Friday evening I decided to wander off in the car to see if there was anything worth photographing & ended up at the Barge Inn at Honey Street a few miles from Pewsey.

I had a pint of cider & then wandered along the canal for a couple of hundred yards & back.

All the shots are HDR made with 3 shots at different exposures & combined in Photomatix to create image with a wide range of light & shadow. Usually, you require a tripod for these so all 3 shots are identically framed, but as I didn’t have one these are all handheld.

I have about 2 or 3 compact flash cards which I use when I’m out and about on a shoot. Rather than having bucketfuls of cards I prefer to save my shots straight from the cards onto a portable hard drive. For the last 3 years I’ve been using a 40GB Vosonic XS-Drive, which is a small battery-operated device with slots for several different memory card formats. You slot in the card, press the transfer button & it saves your shots onto the hard drive. When I get home I transfer them across onto the PC.

When I upgraded the PC I also changed to Vista (bloody awful experience but that’s another story. One of the things which didn’t work ever again with the Vista PC was the XS-Drive. So I had to transfer my shots onto the kids’ PC, then save them out onto either DVDs or USB memory sticks & then out onto my PC.

This was a complete pain so, to be honest, when the XS-Drive died recently, I wasn’t too annoyed.

I researched around for a new device but decided I’d prefer to have a viewing capability so needed one with a screen. The Epson ones look pretty good but at around £400 are a bit out of my price range. In the end I settled for the Vosonic VP 5500. I got mine from WarehouseExpress delivered the next day. They were out of stock on the 160GB so I got a 120GB version.

They have a great little 3.5inch TFT screen. They come with a replaceable SATA hard drive, so they can be upgraded with a bigger drive. They do eat the battery if viewing a lot of photos but at about £6 via eBay you can get spare Fuji batteries for them, so I have a spare which I charge up & take with me; they just slot in via a tab at the bottom, no screwdriver required.

They view many RAW files direct so you can view your shots straight away. With the small LCD screen of the 20D, this is an ideal alternative to viewing your shots in the field.

I’ve only used it a couple of times but am already finding it a really useful addition to the kit setup.

Here you can see a photograph of what went on at the biggest airshow in the world at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire over the weekend of July 12th & 13th.

That’s it. nothing, no aircraft, no airshow. The whole thing was cancelled.

Military Aviation photography is one of my favourite photographic pursuits & RIAT really is the pinnacle of airshows in Europe. I couldn’t make it last year so this year was determined to attend, so much so that I took 4 days. Thursday I got all my stuff ready, charged batteries, made sure I had spare memory cards & batteries & all the kit was ready & working. Despite the fact that the airshow was sponsored by Barclays Bank & they were selling tickets at selected branches, none of the banks in my local towns had any & I found it impossible to find out by phone and visiting the bank, which branches actually had them. In the end I had to travel some distance to St Albans to get them from a branch of Robert Dyas at £32.50 each.

I went down to Wiltshire on Friday morning & found a camp site at the back of a pub about 30 miles south of the airbase. I had an early might under canvass (yes, it rained) & set off for the airshow at 6am on Saturday. As I started to pick up the signs to the airshow I found that most of them had white stickers across them with ‘AIRSHOW CANCELLED‘ in red. I thought that maybe peace protesters had been out overnight but when I got to the Gloucestershire border I found the police turning people back. The airbase viewing & parking areas were swamped with recent rain. They announced that they’d make a decision about whether Sunday would go ahead on Saturday afternoon.

I turned round, found a layby & studied the SatNav to find a suitable location to take some photos. I ended up driving 85 miles to Portsmouth (shots to follow).

Saturday night, I was hopeful that Sunday’s display would go ahead, it hadn’t rained all day. Sadly, it was also cancelled. By the time I found out it was too late to come home so I stayed in the pub by the campsite & made my way home on Sunday morning.

The really annoying thing was that Duxford’s Summer Airshow was the same two days, had I realised RIAT was going to be cancelled I could have gone to Duxford, instead I got neither.

And it’s going to take up to eight weeks to get my ticket money back.

I got a laptop last week. I’ve not owned a laptop since I had a second-hand old 386 many years ago. I still have it in the loft somewhere.

Having used one at the baby Shoot I did a while ago so I could show Mums their shots there & then (I borrowed my wife’s) I thought it would be a good addition to the armoury. It will also mean I don’t have to spend so much time shut away on the main machine in what I euphamistically call ‘the office’. I might still spend far too long on a computer but at least I can do it in the front room with my family.

I bought a Asus Notebook A7U-7P274C AMDTL58 1.9GHz 2048MB 250GB 17" widescreen DVD-SM WLAN webcam card reader Vista Home Premium 2 year manufacturer’s warranty, phew! If you’re interested in the spec you can see it here. I purchased it from ebuyer & got it for £399 including VAT which was a pretty damned good price considering it’s currently on offer for £472 on MicroDirect’s website, which usually is fairly competitive. It’s currently out of stock, I’m not surprised as it seemed like a great deal for the specification, eBuyer gets most of my custom for PC-related stuff & has done for several years, their prices are usually among the best.

I’ve stuck Lightroom & Photoshop CS3 on there and although slower than my desktop, it seems to perform OK. Mind you, my desktop has 6GB RAM compared to the Laptop’s 2. It’s got a 17" screen which is great for graphics work. I’m currently processing some of my F1 Testing shots on there.

I got a USB mini-mouse as I can’t get used to those bloody touchpad thingies. I could always plug the Bamboo into it for graphics work.