Mini mayhem

Every year in Lincoln, there is a mini fest. Dozens of the little cars congregate on the Brayford Pool area of the City, people have a catch up and natter, and hundreds of photographers swarm all over the place, looking to capture a few nice images of the event and the colourful little cars. There are loads of good photo opportunities and the image below was my favourite from the time I visited.

This was the composition that I felt worked the strongest on the day. I love the symmetry and the colour. The original worked well, with a few tweaks in Photoshop, but I also wanted to give the image a grungy urban feel. A slight blurring of the buildings along with an application of a texture and slight vignette gave me the picture I was after. It's been highly commended in a National photographic competition where the theme was colour and is on sale as a fine art print at lincolnartworks.com. It looks fantastic in a black frame with no border.

Fuji X100 in Action

As promised, just a few images from this weekends Anti Drone demo at R.A.F. Waddington. I love the way you can just merge into the crowd with the Fuji X100. I really like the picture quality, the saturated colours, the dynamic range and the fact that it's near enough silent. I was literally right behind the people you see in the three images below and they were oblivious to me ( Okay, the fact that they had their backs to me may have played a part).

 

I somehow managed to find myself on the very front of the demonstration at one point with the Nations media pointing all sorts of long lenses at me. Luckily I was wearing my beanie hat so I merged right in. It was at this point that I turned round and took a picture of the people just behind. Again, no one seemed to notice me, apart from the tall bloke in the overly large denim jacket.

 I was having to over expose the camera by about 1 stop on most of the shots, simply to control the effect that the sky was having on the Fuji's metering system. Other than that, the Fuji behaved itself impeccably and I really enjoyed the experience. Protest marches don't happen that often in Lincolnshire, so to get my Fuji fix again soon, a road trip might be in order.  

Fuji X100





Fuji X100

   

Whoohoo, my very first blog post, and hopefully the first of many. It's going to be me rambling on about cameras and camera stuff, my picture editing, and some of my fantastical adventures with my camera gear around Lincolnshire. Firstly a bit about me. I'm a professional Wedding and Portrait photographer and you can see some of my work, (and the guy I work with) over at www.candgphotography.org. I'm sure in time, I will write articles about some of my Wedding shoots, and the editing techniques I employ, but for now the blog will concentrate on the photos I take for pleasure and the stock sites I submit images to, as well as the gear that I use. After all, the title of the blog was a bit of a give away.

The cheeky little chap above is the Fuji X100, and I have to say I absolutely love this little camera. As I mentioned, I'm a Wedding photographer, so having the right equipment to capture every moment, every little detail, is paramount. I shoot with Nikon cameras, my three bodies at the moment being a D3s, a D4 and a D200. (Blog posts to follow). They are amazing and do exactly what I need, but I was finding that walking around town trying a bit of street photography with these bad boys around my neck was becoming a bit of a chore. People would clock me from 50 metres away, look me up and down with a degree of suspicion and veer away. I may as well have had a machine gun round my neck. As you can imagine getting a candid shot was pretty much impossible, unless I used a long lens, and then I looked like some kind of perv. I needed something that flew under the radar, something that was small and people didn't take seriously. Enter the Fuji X100. The picture quality is fantastic and it's high ISO abilities are very good. Okay, I'm spoilt with the D4 and D3s in this department, but still, pretty damn good. It's also tiny in comparison to the big Nikon pro bodies and virtually silent, perfect for some undercover street photography. It utilises a 23mm lens which offers a 35mm equivalent focal length. That means you have to try and get in quite close to your subject, but that's half the fun isn't it? It's at it's best in crowded places where nobody bats an eyelid. A prime example of this was at an anti war demonstration this weekend. I wanted to try and get a few images for an International stock site, and thought this would be as good an opportunity as any. I mingled with the crowd, had a chat with a few people, and snapped away like a madman. It was great fun and the images I managed to capture were of great quality, ( I will post some soon ). It was light, silent, and performed admirably, and when it was spotted, It got a few knowing nods, it's as if I'd joined a secret society. My girlfriend was so impressed, she bought one too. I've had so much fun with the X100, from now on there will be a place for it in my camera bag at Weddings, where I will mingle, become invisible, get ignored... just how I like it.