I can't believe I've come down with Man Flu again!. That's twice in two months and joking apart I've felt pretty rough. Luckily it didn't come on until Saturday night as I had a busy end to the week last week.

On Thursday I photographed a forum for Lux magazine at a superb shopping centre next to St Paul's Cathedral called One New Change -http://www.onenewchange.com/ . The forum was a round the table discussion about retail lighting featuring some leading figures from the lighting design community. My brief was to capture the attendees in full flow using a very shallow depth of field to give a blurred background to the shots. I used my Canon EF 70-200 F2.8 L IS lens wide open at f2.8 for the entire shoot. I also shot some video during the forum so it was a busy couple of hours. That lens is really superb and even wide open the quality is very good indeed. I've posted one of the shots in today's blog to illustrate the shallow depth of field effect.
On Friday I post processed the Lux magazine still photo's and compressed the video down as the original HD files are huge. The quality of the 5D MK2 video is incredible but even short clips of say 10 seconds are around 50 megs or so hence the need to compress the video output to a more usable size.

I was in London at 8am on Saturday to photograph the set of a fashion show called Disruption which was held at the Barbican in London on Saturday night. I was commissioned by Overbury the main contractor who had built the stage and surrounding set overnight on Friday which was designed by TP Bennett architects. The set looked great as did the pieces of art (clouds on sticks) which were placed around the Barbican in the public spaces to promote the show. I tried to show the public interacting with the clouds and I enjoyed the challenge as it took me a while to work out how to approach the shoot.

Here's a couple of the shots from the Barbican that show the public area and the stage. Do they look like clouds?. I think the design of the clouds above the stage is very clever as they each contain an LED light source and integral battery. The health and safety restrictions meant that live electrics being fed the illuminated clouds would be out of the question so a battery was the answer.