Long Weekend

Well, for what was an incredibly lazy weekend physically, I've certainely taken a fair few shots by way of re-dressing the balance.

Saturday was spent in the company of a bunch of Guildford's parkour/free-running fraternity. So a huge thanks to everyone involved for pulling that together. In particular, thanks to the guys for keeping on pulling out the same, precise moves each time to allow me to get the shots. I hope you're as happy with them as I am.

Technically I found it quite had to stop using the fish-eye when I started, especially when the sky was being to obligingly photogenic ( and Beedy too for that matter!).

But, I did manage to get stuff it back in the bag and concentrate more on using an conventional zoom and remembering to think and set some lighting up before firing away on the spur of the moment. Hopefully a follow-up shoot will be on the cards soon.

Sunday, was not so good, a couple of friends and I rolled up relatively late to the Torq 12:12 mtb race. Not enough time to reccy the course made for not enough time to set up properly, making for very few shots that I'm actually happy with. Still lessons have been learned and mistakes made will not be repeated. This is probably my favourite shot as, for me, it captures the surreal feeling you get when rolling in towardd the start/finsh again when you've been out there for 10 out of 12 hours already.

Putting my own, photographic, issues aside from last night though, the 12:12 event looks like a good one. I did have it pencilled in on my calendar for this season, but a lack of commited training on my part means I'll have to think about it again next year instead.

The theme of mild laziness continued into today's bank holiday. The extent of today's movement was a walk around The Devil's Punchbowl. Again by way of my own mental compromise, I took a camera. I'm still getting to grips with thinking in infra-red with the converted D60, today gave e more chances with solid blue sky and loads of back-lit green. Blue=Black, Green=White, the rest I'm slowly getting to grips with. Luckily lenses still have an IR focus mark on them too.

(The other thing about the digital IR process is that there is still "developing"required to get something useable from the initial image. It's not the same as processing and printing as it used to be, but having to take care during the processing to get the a raw image that is useable in Lightroom for "normal" pp work is similarily theraputic. And ideal for a lazy bank holiday afternoon.)