aCoolDryPlace Photography

This pictue accomanying this post only merits being small, because it is terrible and I feel ashamed. In my defence I took it using my wife’s point&shoot in a hurry over breakfast while trying to stop my daughter decorating the room / my equipment with soggy shreddies.

This is my latest bit of kit, a Vosonic VP5500, it’s a portable harddrive with built in card reader designed to download/backup photos on the go. This will enable me to take more photos without having to go back to my computer to free up space on memory cards. Good for weddings, and great for holidays.

I haven’t had much chance to play with it yet, so I’m not sure how long the battery will last, or how long each card will take to download. However, neither of these should be too much of an issue, as I have a charger (and you can usually find a plug socket around most places), and I have many memory cards. Surely it can download fast than I can fill them…

I’ve seen Wordles in number of places now, and so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon. Here’s a Wordle of this blog created today - although not including this post - but perhaps iteratively doing it could be interesting… - perhaps not.

This was created at Wordle.net. The size of words depends on the frequency of their occurence. Consequently it shows what I post about most, or at least the words I use most when posting. It’s not surprising to see photos, wedding and Oxford coming up quite large. Perhaps the colour scheme I choose is not the best as ball comes up quite large, but it took me a while to find because it is in a light colour. Another factor affecting it’s size is that I use it slightly interchangably with event, meaning both come out a little smaller than wedding.

I may resort to creating one of these each month, I may not. We’ll see.

The Oxford Institute of Legal Practice (Oxilp) Ball took place at the Randolph hotel in Oxford. The students of this ball were celebrating the end of their legal practice course, and it was nice to see a few tutors joined them. Being a friday night, I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare after getting home before going out again, which meant I forgot a number of things - like the gels we used on the background for the previous ball (St Hugh’s & Corpus). However, we did have a new set of lights with us enabling us to do a 4 light hi-key setup, as shown below. I don’t really like this style much personally, and have shyed away from it because so many other event photographers use it. I like to offer something different. But the clients seemed to like it, and the results were pretty good.

4-Light setup for hi-key at the Randolph

Julian Simpson, who assists me at such events, put in an heroic effort for this ball, driving from south-west Wales to make it to Oxford by 17:30. He also worked tirelessly throughout the night, and uploaded all the images to my sales area. If you’re looking for a photographer in the Bristol or south Wales area, I’d highly recommend him.

Nick and Rachel’s Wedding was the 31st May, but it’s taking me a while to work through all the photos from it, so I hadn’t got around to writing about it. Nick and Rachel were a lovely laid back couple. Nick is in a band with his bestman, so they did a set during the evening reception. The bride joined one of the songs (as in the picture above). Still many more photos to process, but hopefully they’ll be available in the client section with a couple of weeks.

In addition to Rob and Lenka’s wedding blessing, this weekend was also my grandfather’s 90th Birthday. I took my studio kit along to get some photos of the family, especially of Jack with his 3 great-grandchildren. Two of the little ones were grotty for much of the time as they were busy fighting over the dolly and pushchair, but having the studio up for most of the day enabled me to get at least one decent shot of each of them. Once I’ve finished editing Rob&Lenka’s photos (60ish to go) and other work for customers, I’ll edit the rest of these and put them up on this site. Whilst I don’t really count family as clients, using this site is the easiest way for them to choose their prints too.