After years of great service my EOS 5D MK2 has started to do some really odd things. Twice this week the LCD screen has gone mad basically turning itself into a flashing mess of lines and colour!. After a quick off and on manouvre it's reset itself but I think it might be time to send her back to Canon for a service.
My camera kit is used pretty much every day and although I'm careful with it all there are the unavoidable bumps and dings but I have to say that the Canon kit seems to be unbelievably reliable. My L series lenses are now about 8 years old and they have never missed a beat and my original EOS5D body (that I use as a backup or for jobs when I don't need really high res files) has taken hundreds of thousands of pictures.
My biggest advice for anyone buying camera kit is to get the best you can afford even if it means buying fewer lenses etc. Often people buy several cheap lenses when in reality one or two top quality ones would be a far better bet. Also buy second hand - my Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS lens was bought used from Aperture Photographic (http://apertureuk.com/)  in London and I saved around £600 on a new lens!.
I still use my 1976 Canon F1N too when I need to shoot black and white film and it still works perfectly to this day.

I started to write this entry last Sunday so my timeline has gone a bit mad but to bring my diary up to date on line I had a shoot on Tuesday 15th at the National Physical Laboratory in Shepperton.This is a very cool place and I took a few shots of the newly refurbished offices where Philips Lighting have supplied some very state of the art LED recessed office lights. I was very impressed to find out that they have a mini Hadron Collider at the NPL although unfortunatley I didn't get to see it!.

On Wednesday 16th I had the "after" shoot at a warehouse in Birmingham where Dialight (http://www.dialight.com/) have supplied LED highbay luminaires to replace the existing SON lowbay fittings. Not only has the lighting level improved dramatically but the colour is also far better. I was very impressed with the result and I've posted a before and after picture in today's blog to show the effect. They've even managed to reduce the quantity of fittings substantially too so it's a great lighting solution all round. I was commissioned by Christine Gupta of The Gupta Partnership (http://http://www.guptapartnership.co.uk/) who specialise in high impact marketing and PR to take the pictures.