On the 6th of March my choir performed our spring concert at St Mary the Virgin Church in Pirton near Hitchin. We had the rehearsal during the early afternoon & I took my camera with me.

After the rehearsal I spent some time in & around the church setting up some shots which I intended to process with HDR (High Dynamic Range).

The shots were taken hand-held on the 1DMkIV, five shots in a rapid sequence, then married up on Photomatix & combined. The processing is a little more subtle than the more obvious HDR effects you quite often see.

The couple in the car arrived by driving into one of my shots, the quickly realised & reversed back behind the church so I could finish taking the shot. By the time I worked my way round the church to where they had parked, the car was still there. I liked the fresh, shiny, smooth bodywork against the old stone of the church walls.

In the first week of March my eldest came home for the weekend from University. We took the opportunity to take Tess for a walk around the back of Norton on the outskirts of Letchworth Garden City.

It may look sunny but it was bloody freezing. Walking around for a couple of hours with no gloves on a metal 70-200mm lens is not for the feint-hearted.

Here’s a shot of yours truly, taken by my daughter.

I just liked the graphical quality of this shot…

Watford Cheetahs, the BAFL team I shot last season, have started training towards the 2010 season which starts in April. On the 13th March they invited the London Blitz up to their ground in Watford for a practice scrimmage.

It was good to see a few old faces from last season & encouraging to see lots of new faces.

I was made to feel very welcome by new Head Coach, Drew Anderson

The scrimmage was basically each team taking it in turns to go through their play book & practice their plays against a real opposition. There were no points scoring & no winners & losers.

All the shots were taken on manual settings with small adjustments as the light changed.

I’m looking forward to a great season with the Cheetahs & hope to come up with some shots which they’ll be really pleased with. You can see the rest of the shots from the day on my old website.

Saturday 27th March 2010 sees the end of the Letchworth Garden City Camera Club Annual Exhibition. It ran for a month at the museum in Letchworth town centre.

This is my second camera club exhibition & I had 6 or 7 shots displayed. I was also lucky enough to be one of the chosen four to have their shots featuring on our advertising poster. You can see the shot of the B-17 Aircrew in the first shot. My black & white shot of the B-17 itself is on the right hand side of that shot also.

Focus on Imaging is the largest photographic show in the UK & is held at the NEC in Birmingham. This is the third year I’ve attended.

Talk about being a kid in a chocolate shop, you can find everything at Focus. I bought my Elinchroms last year. This year I had to reign in the spedning as I’d only got the 1D MkIV a few weeks earlier, so major acquisitions were out of the question.

The other great thing about Focus is all the free talks & seminars. You can pick up so much info. I watched a couple on the Flash Centre’s stand, one by a guy on ‘Strobist’ type photography, basically, photography with flashguns. Then there was another by someone who is using a 5D MkII for video production. Another good talk was at the PhotoTraining4U stand on black & white portraiture & how to make money from it. I was quite impressed with their seminars that I later joined their training website.

Several stands give you the opportunity to photograph some models. Lastolite had the ever-gorgeous Katy Green. I popped by their stand in the morning & the afternoon & took my chance to grab a few shots. Looking at them I doubt you’d be able to tell I was just standing in the crowdline waiting for her to look into my lens. The shots are taken with the ambient light on my 1D MkIV with 70-200 f2.8 lens.

I walked away from the show with another Pocket Wizard, a white shoot-through umbrella & a Lastolite Ezybox & stand for my flashgun.

I was recently looking out for some white vinyl background to replace the muslin sheet I’ve been using. I managed to get some from an unlikely source. At Christmas I found a company in Glasgow that supplies vinyl for the sides of HGV trailers. lastolite have a wipe-clean vinyl background which I think is almost £200 for 2.5 metres by about 6 metres. I managed to get a roll of white vinyl for around £40 for 3 metres by 7 metres, even with the £30 delivery, this still represents a significant saving.

So how did it perform?

It’s heavy, I needed help to fit the thick card roll onto my background stand.

At 7 or 8 metres there is plenty to form a good length train. The setup above is in my front room. I used my older eBay (Hong Kong) lights on the background & the newer Elinchroms as the main flash. Note the card spill-killer boards clamped to the background lights to prevent light straying on to the model.

Unfortunately, I found the battery on my flash meter had run out & being as they take a non-standard sized battery I was a bit stuck, so I had to use the old fashioned way, setting the light power & checking the shots until I had a decent combination of aperture & shutter speed. hapily, it only took a couple of shots to sort. I hooked up the camera to my laptop & shot tethered so that Laura could instantly see the results of her modelling.

We even got Tess in on the action, although she’s not the most confident of models.

All in all, I’m really pleased with the new background. It will be a useful addition to my studio kit.

Posted under Photo Equipment, Photo Shoots

On the 14th February Hertfordshire travelled to Birmingham University to face the toughest challenge of their season so far. The Lions are the current BUAFL champions & haven’t lost a league game for several years.

The day didn’t start well with poor weather & rain enveloping the south east. Surprisingly as I got further up the M1, the sun started to come out. The game started in bright sunshine, though this varied throughout the gaem, it stayed dry.

Sadly, the challenge was too great for the Hurricanes to meet & it soon became clear that their rivals were equal to their reputation. The Lions ended up victors by 44 to 12.

If the Hurricanes advance to the playoffs, the chances are that they will meet the Lions again. If they do, they’ll have to put a stop to the silly little errors which plagued their game.

The new camera was a joy to use & I can’t wait until the summer season where the weather is the same throughout the whole game.

I love the first shot which captures a facemasking penalty in glorious technicolor.

you can see the rest of the game shots on my old website.

On the 7th February the Hertfordshire Hurricanes started the second half of their season by hosting the Southampton Stags.

This was a bit of a tester for me as it was the first time I’d used the brand new Canon 1D MkIV, a camera I’d had less than a week.

It certainly was a different experience being able to fire off 10 shots a second rather than 3.9. But it does take some getting used to. I’ll do a better report when I get some time.

The Hurricanes won the game 26-0 continuing their winning season.

Just popped into the garden to test out the 600mm with a Canon 1.4 converter.

I was really pleased to get the Black Cap which is a rare visitor to our garden. The Blackbird shot isn;t cropped at all, it was a shame it only perched nexty to the green wire feeder as it would have been better looking like it was in a more ‘natural’ setting.

In needed to take my 600mm lens back to Canon in January as I’d lost the little nut which holds the collar on. The service centre is just down the road in Elstree.

On the way back I stopped off at Tyttenhangar Gravel Pits to make sure the lens was working OK. There wasn’t any wildlife about due to the snow, so I tested it on the local flora.

The little white dots you can see are snow flakes, not sensor dust!