Camping instead of Working - Huzzah!!

The better half is away right now, so I type this with the dog, Kasper asleep on my feet. He's not usually allowed upstairs so this is a huge treat for him. I'm enjoying it too as he's keeping my feet warm.

The last few days have been pretty busy as I've had a couple of major jobs on photography wise.

The first was the Blueprint Awards Ceremony, held in the Stadium of Light last Thursday. I had decided not to use any flash but stick to fast lenses, high ISO and aggresive noise reduction.

This all sounds well and good, but when I arrived, the light levels were extraordinarily low and at ISO 1600 f2.8 I was struggling to get a 60th of a second - many of the shots were taken at a 30th and some as low as a 15th!!

One 15th of a second with a Nikon 80-200mm lens handheld isn't a recipe for success - that's one big, heavy lens! Even the 17-55 f2.8 is a fair weight. The shots looked fine on the review screen of the D200, but I suspected that when seen large, they'd be a bit soft. I stuck on a 50mm prime (f1.8) and used the D70 with an 85mm prime (f2) and used this combo for much of the night.
Not interested in techie details? Sorry, but I do love my kit!

The second job should have been a piece of piddle, but Photoshop, pictures saved in different formats, my printer dying and several other factors conspired against me. A couple whose wedding I shot last February found they were too busy to put together their own album as per agreed so I offered to print out contact sheets to let them choose which pics went into the album. The job should have taken half an hour max, but ended up eating an entire day. In the end, I sent the files to the excellent Photobox and received the prints, as usual, the next day.

Camping instead of working

On Friday, when I should have been processing the many hundreds of photos taken at Blueprint,Clare, Kasper and I headed off camping to Dent, near Kirby Stephen, near Penrith, etc.

We'd been recommended the High Laning camp site as being dog friendly and otherwise just a great place to stay, and indeed it was. Great situation, nice, friendly pubs and lots of good walking.

Above is a snap of the Dancing Flags, which were sadly static when we arrived. Perhaps they heard us coming and lay down for a rest. I bet they look great right now with a torrential river tearing over them (I should inform my huge foreign following that it's been pissing down here for the last couple of days, causing flooding all over the place).

At the top of the lane leading out of Dent, the vista opened up and though the light wasn't fantastic, I'd dragged my tripod up the hill in sweltering heat and damned if I wasn't going to use it. So here's the view.

The next day (just as hot) saw us heading home, stopping at a few points of interest along the way, like this viaduct. I seem to have formed a habit of getting into trouble with landowners and this day was no exception. I had hauled myself very carefully up onto the dry stane dyke to get a decent viewpoint, when the local farmer roared up the other side of the valley on a quad. Despite not being able to hear what he was shouting, I got the impression he was unhappy with my current situation and wanted me off his bloody wall. Quickly.

Finally for today and just to keep up my hard earned reputation as one of today's foremost practitioners of infra red shooting (hah!), here's one from the most recent effort, showing yet another viaduct a little North of Durham.