The Ritz and Cardiff Castle

Me Julia and Roy (of Philips) having lunch at The Ritz

I can’t believe it’s the middle of May already!. This year has flown past and we’ve been lucky to have stayed really busy throughout. All this talk of a double dip recession has been unhelpful to say the least but fingers crossed things are still going well. Speaking of politics I was supposed to photograph David Cameron last week at Milton Keynes where he was due to visit an innovation centre but unfortunately he didn’t show because of problems at the House of Commons!. All the press photographers, security guards, PR people and even a sniffer dog showed up but unfortunately Dave had to pull out at the last minute!. It’s a shame as I was looking forward to photographing him and I’d love to have posted one of the pictures in the blog.

Cardiff Castle

The new website and blog has been really well received and I can fully recommend David Beach of Daxic for web design (http://www.daxic.com/web_development/) as they were very competitive on the price and gave us a great service. The site is based on a Wordpress blog and once you get used to updating it the interface is pretty easy to use. The image gallery is much nicer than the previous one in Blogger and I’ve just started using the featured image option to show a larger picture above the blog text. Let me know if you think this works or not!.

Over the past three weeks since the last blog entry I’ve been really busy with a local shoot in Milton Keynes at the Bensons for Beds store, I’ve photographed two Asda stores one in Sheffield and one in Birkenhead, a shoot for BUPA in Alderley Edge, a health club in Chichester, Cardiff Castle, an office in Guildford, an evening shoot at a wind turbine factory in Wales and an event at The Ritz in London!. I also photographed the final of the Zumtobel Night Geist lighting design competition at The Royal Albert Hall.

Velo Sports Putney

Add to that all the social media that I try to keep up with as well as various meetings with clients and you can see I’ve been running around like a madman. Thankfully we’ve now taken on someone to help with my post shoot processing workload which is just fantastic as that can become a real job in itself and causes me a lot of worry as I really hate getting behind with my work. Toni (Antonia is her real name but I can’t say that very well!) has a degree in photography and is really keen to learn about the business side of photography. Also she’s a very good photo retoucher and a really good assistant too so happy days all round!. 

Zumtobel Night Geist

I’ve recently been buying up more classic lenses to try on my Canon EOS 5D MK2 and in previous posts I’ve recommended the Pentax 67 lenses which can be used via an adaptor. My most recent purchase is a beautiful Rollei 85mm f2.8 lens made by Carl Zeiss. I bought an adaptor for it recently and the image quality is just superb so I can highly recommend these lenses now too. I’ve also bought a 135mm Rollei and 35mm rollei to try too and I’m hoping these will be just as good. I find that it’s really important to try different kit and these older lenses give a softer image (not too soft or out of focus) which looks less clinical than the modern super sharp lenses when used with a digital body.

On the subject on kit I tried the new Canon EOS 5D MK3 the other day at a trade show in London and the high ISO performance is startling. I shot some pictures at ISO 25,600 and the grain was really well supressed and the pictures incredibly clean. I will be buying one as soon as we got some money in the bank!.