venta

On Saturday, I bumped into philipstorry and we scooped snow_leopard off her train for a day of wombling round museums. Our principal purpose was to go to the Man Ray exhibition at the National Potrait Gallery.

( Black and white )

And then we noodled round a bit more of the NPG, and lunched, and fitted in some more light noodling round the British Museum before SnowLeopard had to hop on her train home again. Altogether a very pleasant day. I seem only to go to proper, paying exhibitions when SnowLeopard organises me into it... must demonstrate non-cultural-vacuumness by self-propelling on occasion :)

If you have seven minutes, forty eight seconds to spare today, I highly recommend watching this slideshow on the BBC, covering the Travel Photographer of the Year competition:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13295855

So, over here in film-camera-world things happen slowly. Actually, what I really mean is over here in not-quite-getting-round-to-it world things happen slowly.

Either way, on 9th June, something exciting happened. I went to a gig and got a given a luridly pink sticker - which said I was allowed to take my camera in. OK, so no one really cared enough to check whether I had a pass or not, but it's the first time I've had one in my own right.

( Pictures of Punish The Atom @ 93 Feet East )

Help, help... FAO kneeshooter, davefish, nalsa or anyone else who can wield a camera best out of three.

A couple of weeks ago I finally summoned the courage to ask if I could take a camera along to a gig; I've been wanting for some time to experiment with this gig-photo-ing lark. Sadly, gigs seem to divide into two categories: sufficiently large that you need a pass, and sufficiently small that it seems rude not to check with the band first. The latter should be easy, but I'm very scaredy.

The gig was in a tiny pub, and I thought a flash gun would be quite annoying to the people on stage, so bought a fast film[*] and trusted to luck. With hindsight, that was a big mistake. I took the pictures at f-buggerall to try and get the exposure time as short as possible, but it was nowhere near short enough.

Pretty much none of the pictures I took are at all presentable, but below the cut I present a few of them anyway in the hopes someone can offer a bit of constructive advice. OK, so the advice may well be "use a flashgun, you fool". (In which case how, with a small stage, do you do it without being intrusive and a nuisance?)

( Pictures (four dreadful, one ok) beneath cut )

Edit Now with fixed markup, so it looks nicer. Honestly, what a lot of fuss over a missing >. And no thanks to the Semagic client's "preview" for displaying it all correctly and thus making me miss the error.