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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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!.
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| 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!.
