A month full of pictures

Well, that's that. The SeaFest is over. I don't have to spend my weekends being irritated by a frustrated and very stressed Italian woman, as lovely as she is. Perhaps that's a little harsh - I couldn't have done what she managed in a second language.
I've spent the last month taking over 200 photos every weekend, all for someone else.
It's been fun, actually. I'm there to take photos of the events and what went on. I didn't really have a brief, so I could take more or less what I wanted.
Some of it was meant to get in the local paper, but everything I took was ignored in favour of either their visiting journo's efforts, or the other photog's work.
Which is fine, actually. The style of our local paper is, in my opinion, as contrived as possible please.
I spoke to our press officer about it, and he said he was glad I'd noticed that.
So, I carried on taking the photos I wanted to take, in the way I wanted to take them. And having handed over the discs religiously on a Monday morning, I'm happier to do so. I'm even happier to take the praise from the organisers as a result.

But I'm glad I can get back to taking photos for myself in my own time again.

Ektar 100

Things I love #1: Kodak Ektar 100.

It's a film stock. By itself, no big whoop. Who shoots film these days anyway, right?
Well, I do. And I'm glad that Kodak have seen fit to release a new stock in a market dominated by DSLRs.
It's been out for a year, and I've been shooting with it from about June.
Kodak reckon it's the worlds finest grain, which means that I can blow up any prints larger than previously possible.
Now, I'm not sure massive prints are that useful to most of us. Most of us just don't have the space for massive A1 prints, but the devil's in the details and Ektar 100 helps keep the resolution at larger sizes. In fact, given that most stuff ends up at 72dpi in a small box on the internet, I'm not entirely convinced that we all need super high resolution for 90% of what we do.

I was a little sceptical about the claims, but given a side by side test at the same high street processors, the results were amazing! Normally the scans I get back from them are a little noisy (even when the neg's not - I've had stuff they've processed properly scanned and the difference is vast) but the Ektar needed no additional post work. It survived their noisy scans!

Of course, it's a 100 speed film so it loves nice bright light or lovely long exposures when it's darker. So that can limit what you're shooting, I admit, but with a little thought it's not a huge issue.

Anyway, some pics I've taken on this wonderful stuff:







You can check out more of this on my Flickr page here.
Yeah, Ektachrome going was a shame. But I'm not complaining too much when they've given us this.

The Monty Burns Campaign has swung into action.

Hi

I'm still deciding what to do with this space, so bear with me. It'll evolve.

There's probably not going to be much by way of a strict chronology to the stuff I write about here, but I hope you enjoy what you will and disregard the rest.

So, where to begin.

My first taste of the advertising industry might be a fun one.

I was sat in a class when the lecturer announced there was a commercial shooting at the studios nearby and would any of us like to get a days experience on set.

So me and friend volunteered. I guess we were pretty pleased with ourselves; a day out of classes and money for doing what we thought we always wanted to do.

Get to the studio and we're already tasked with painting the floor a, well, navy blue I guess. No actual filming just yet - that would be tomorrows plaything.

So, after some final hammering, general construction and some highly questionable set design, we more or less have a shooting set ready for the next day.

After dragging our no good student selves down to the studio for the shoot, it turns out the female star of the show is a vegetarian. Might be a problem when you're expected to eat a processed pork product. She's also pregnant, and swigging from a bottle of Lemsip as she's full of a cold.

My big moment on my first job - holding a bucket off shot for her to spit the product into.

Yup, it's all glamour.