My Volvo V50 has gone wrong again - the clutch master cylinder has broken for the second time in 6 months and I had to drive the last few miles home with the car stuck in 3rd gear!. Apart from that it was a pretty good day and it's great to be back at work.

My job today was a BUPA care home in Ipswich where I photographed the interior for a new brochure. As usual for interior photography I used the 24mm tilt and shift lens for 80% of the shots and the 24-105mm for the detail shots. The 24mm T/S lens is a real gem and I would recommend it to anyone who shoots interiors or architecture. The ability to shift the front of the lens up and down (a bit like the old view cameras with the bellows between the back and lens) means that I don't have to tilt the camera up or down at all hence removing the converging vertical lines one gets when a camera is tilted up or down from the horizontal. Canon have now added a 17mm T/S lens to their range but at £2000 plus it's a bit too dear and I'll wait until the price drops a bit once the novelty of the new lens wears off a bit.

Tomorrow I've got another interior shoot for BUPA in Gloucestershire followed by a night shoot in London so it's going to be a long and busy day. On top of that I've got to arrange a hire car while the increasingly unreliable Volvo heads back to the dealership in Milton Keynes for more repairs.

I'm hoping to do some video editing training on Wednesday with Final Cut Pro then on Thursday I've another interior shoot this time in Salisbury in Wiltshire which is cool as I love driving across to that part of the country.

I've attached a picture in today's blog from the IUCN shoot in Switzerland back in May which illustrates the use of the tilt and shift lens. Here I took a picture looking down the staircase but because I've shifted the lens down rather than tilting the camera the vertical lines still look straight and natural. I really dislike architectural pictures that have walls sloping in and although this is sometimes done for effect I'm always careful to avoid this if at all possible.