Billo's Photos - A Blog

Important News- NEW BLOG!!!

2010-02-15T06:25:00.001Z

I've spent the afternoon transferring my blog to a new address. Many years ago I registered http://simonbills.blogspot.com with a view to using it as a travel blog, this didn't really pan out the way I had planned so it's been lying dormant for several years. It's now been defrosted and brought out to replace Billo's Photos which just doesn't sound that professional, don't worry, my entire backlog of posts can be found at the new blog.

This will be my last post here.

Make sure you check in to http://simonbills.blogspot.com going forward to see what I've been up to, also don't forget to change any bookmarks you might have as it would be a crying shame for you to miss any future spider related terror posts.

Missing the UK?

2010-02-10T11:39:00.003Z

I've been back home in Adelaide for 2 months now. Wow. That went fast. So far I'd have to say my return has gone extremely well, better than expected, after a few weeks of feeling unsettled I quickly found my feet and am loving the lifestyle Australia has to offer.

However.

It's not all beer and skittles, there are certainly a few things I miss about the UK. Rather than give you some sort of extensive list I'm just going to jump straight to number one. The main thing I miss is the absence of MASSIVE DEADLY SPIDERS.

As part of my move into my new place last week we moved a BBQ from my parent's shed. We moved it quite a lot, from the shed to the lawn, from the lawn to the trailer, from the trailer to the new back yard – you get the idea. The whole time someone was holding the BBQ like this:

Three days after moving in I decided to fire up the BBQ for some tasty sausages, imagine my terror when I saw a GIANT DEADLY REDBACK spider crawling on it. Needless to say the sausages were cooked on the George Forman that night. The following day I did some investigation and discovered this insipid arachnid chilling in her web about 10cm away from where our ungloved hands had been earlier that week. Still can't believe I didn't check! As if a redback alone isn't terrifying enough there were 3 sacks under there which I can assume were filled to the brim with THOUSANDS of REDBACK BABIES. I was forced to euthanise the redback family, I don't like to kill spiders but I make an exception for ones that can kill babies and the elderly.

So, still jumpy after my earlier discovery I opened the laundry door to disturb a HUGE huntsman spider. I know these guys almost never bite people, and they're not deadly, but phobias aren't rational and it still freaked me out more than in should. Maybe it was because I'd recently watched this clip?

He quickly ran to the top corner of the laundry, he was happy, I was happy enough, we each knew where each other stood and kept ourselves to ourselves. This is what he looked like.

The following day I was enjoying a little TV when I saw movement on one of the lounge chairs. Uh oh, another BLOODCURDLING SUPER SPIDER.

I think I've pretty much seen the worst of the infestation, my place isn't big enough to house too many more big ones, and I've given the perimeter of a house a good spray which should keep any would be party crashers out.

Looks like last week's excellent galah has been countered by the events of the last few days. Hopefully the next wildlife I see will be another good one, koala perhaps? As long as mum doesn't have to come and get it out of my house with a broom I'll be happy.

Flamin' Galah

2010-02-05T01:11:00.003Z

Alf Stewart would have loved it. Yesterday as I gazed out my kitchen window I noticed a galah perched upon the fence in my carport. A real life flamin' galah just sitting there practically begging for his photo to be taken!! Needless to say I was happy to oblige, I rushed to the spare room, attached the 70-200 big bertha and shot a few shots through the grubby window. If nothing else it proved that such a classic Australian bird was on my property, but the shots weren't exactly blog worthy, it was time to move outside. As I got closer and closer Gary (that's what I've named him) was totally un-phased, I moved all around him, left to right, behind, always getting closer, I eventually was no more than 1.5m away. Gary was just playing it cool.

It was a perfect house warming gift generously bestowed upon me by Australia's native fauna, although it must be said the ice cream scoop I received that night ran a very close second.

Here's a couple of shots around the house, plus a bunch of Gary.

Don't forget Adelaide, I live here now and am taking booking for weddings and portraits so if you know someone who's after some beautiful, fun and elegant photos then point them in my direction!

Changes afoot

2010-01-31T05:04:00.003Z

In the unlikely event there's any Simon Bills Blog tragics out there you may have noticed it's been a little while since my last post. My first instinct is to explain that this is due to my impending move into my new house keeping me busy, which is true to an extent, but that I remember that I've managed to squeeze several hours of Australian Open tennis into most days this fortnight and my moral high ground looks decidedly shaky.

So, tomorrow is moving day, perhaps the most exciting day of 2010 thus far (and there's already been quite a few exciting days so this is saying something). I've been busy over the last month acquiring all sorts of essential home-wares in the post Christmas sales (my parents' lounge room pretty much looks like a Harvey Norman warehouse) and tomorrow it all goes into my new pad. I've also inherited a bunch of second hand furniture from my parents and my brother (actually, some of it is 3rd hand having started with the folks before moving onto my brother and now to me - just like a school uniform) which will give me the skeleton ingredients of a house.

After years of living in flats in London and Edinburgh I'm super excited to not be sharing a wall with any neighbors and having my own little backyard. Midnight Rock Band sessions can now be enjoyed without the nagging feeling that I'm keeping the whole building awake. Another thing I'm pumped about is the spare bedroom I'll set up as my office, having a vacant room is a luxury that just doesn't exist in central London so the plan is to get a massive monitor set up in there and run the Macbook Pro as a dual screen. This will also be better for my back than hours of slouching on the couch editing photos (or writing blogs...)!

Oh, here's some news that's even more exciting than my new house, the couple I did the maternity shoot for a few weeks back are now proud parents to a bouncing baby boy!! Congrats Miranda and Dan, can't wait to meet him!

And because every blog entry deserves a photo here's one I took when the Tour Down Under went through Stirling last week.

The next entry will be sent from MY NEW HOUSE!!!!!

Lance and the Tour Down Under

2010-01-18T00:00:00.003Z

Those of you in Adelaide will be well aware of what's happening at the moment, and let's face it, you've probably had just about enough Lance-mania for the decade, but those overseas might be impressed to learn that Adelaide is currently hosting the Tour Down Under which features none other than global sporting icon Lance Armstrong.

Yesterday saw the lead up event to the tour proper, a 50km street race around the CBD of Adelaide, not dissimilar to the track the Formula 1 cars took 25 years ago (wow, was 1985 really that long ago??). This street race didn't count for the actual tour, I understand there was some cash up for grabs so the cyclists were slugging it out for that as well as to have a final warm up. I didn't expect Lance to really try too hard in this event, I mean, the guy turned up in his private jet last week so he's not exactly desperate for the cash, so I was thrilled to see he was part of a break away pack of 4 of 5 riders when I arrived which made taking his photo a whole lot easier (I was running a little late after some cricket in the nets ran a little over time - I love this country!).

Without further ado I present Lance and the Tour Down Under.

For the photographers out there I changed the focus setting to AI Servo to accommodate rapid fire shots which remain in focus (I have it set to 1 shot for pretty much everything else I shoot besides sports). I also set my camera to high speed burst mode (6 frames per second on the 40D, 3.9 on the 5D2 I think) and basically fired off a lot of shots when the guys rode past. In fast moving sports like cycling, actually, in pretty much any sport, it's very much a game of hit and miss, you need to do everything right in terms of framing and focusing and exposure, but beyond that it's largely a game of luck, the more you shoot the more chance you have of getting a killer shot. I was at the cycling for about 40 minutes yesterday, I took 360 photos, 90 of which I've kept. OF those 90 there are around 25 which I'd consider decent shots, the best of which you've just seen. It took me 60-90 minutes to go through all the photos, delete the shots I don't want and edit the photos I plan to keep.

Miranda and Dan: Maternity Shoot

2010-01-14T04:07:00.004Z

Yesterday I had the pleasure of taking a heavily pregnant Miranda and her husband Dan for a maternity shoot around Adelaide. Now, I've seen pregnant girls in my time, but I've never seen one who looks like Miranda before, everything about her looked identical to when I last saw her 12 months ago, only she had a basketball stuffed under top. It was almost comical.

We headed to a couple of places I plan on becoming very familiar with as I shoot more weddings and portraits round Adelaide, the botanic gardens and the beach. As expected both places were a treasure trove of photographic ideas and I'm super happy with how the shots have turned out.

For the photographers out there, I've learnt in recent weeks just how different the light is in Australia compared to the UK, it's so harsh and there's just so much of it. In the UK most of the time it's cloudy and you don't really need to consider where the sun is in the sky, over here it's a whole new world which I'm loving wrapping my head around. Harsh bright sun can be tricky but you can also get some interesting effects, I used my reflector yesterday for the first time in 12 months and it was gold.

Don't forget, if you're after a wedding or portrait photographer or know someone who is then get in touch.

Oh, in other exciting news my new website is all but complete, I will be launching it at midday tomorrow (Friday) so make sure you check in!!

That was sooo last decade

2010-01-03T05:08:00.004Z

Yesterday I was issued a challenge from my friend Steve at a BBQ.

"I bet you can't use the phrase 'that was sooo last decade' 10 times today"

The gauntlet had been laid down, and after some clarification on a few things it was game on. The rules were pretty loose and lazy, but the vibe of them was that you had to sneak it in such that any newcomer to the conversation wouldn't think what you were saying was weird, ie it had to make sense and be applicable to the conversation.

I got the ball rolling straight away and by the time I went to my cousin's 21st later that day I was already up to four. With a totally fresh group of people to work with I was in full flight, my sister in law arrived with a new hair colour, a reddish tint rather than her usual blonde.

"Why the change of colour Amanda?"
"I just wanted something a bit different"
"Good call, blonde hair was sooo last decade anyway"

I was chatting with some cousins about my secret mission when one of them asked me what I'd do if hadn't reached the full 10 by the time I went home. I replied that I might have to finish it off online, maybe hit a few chat rooms, only problem being that chat rooms are sooo last decade and it's all about Twitter these days.

Later that night I was at another birthday party discussing favourite words with a journalist, I asked what her favourite word was knowing full that no matter what came out of her mouth my reply was going to be "that word is sooo last decade". Thinking back I probably came across as a bit of a jerk, I needlessly insulted another friend's Champion t-shirt labelling it as last decade's stock.

Unfortunately when it was all said and done I fell two short of my targeted 10. I was obviously disappointed but able to console myself with the knowledge that accepting stupid challenges is sooo last decade.

Speaking of things last decade, or more specifically, last year, I have compiled my favourite shots of 2009. I've excluded shots taken at weddings, this is all personal stuff with a handful of couple shots of friends thrown in for good measure.

Click here for the slideshow, sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Hot weddings

2010-01-01T02:43:00.004Z

I've recently had the pleasure of attending 2 weddings (on consecutive Wednesday's no less) as a guest rather than photographer. I like it. Sue and Luke were married on a 41 degree day down by the beach on December 23, I left my big camera at home and only took a handful of shots on my indestructible Olympus point and shoot - indestructible it may be, but capable of taking good photos in anything other than perfect lighting it is not! As a result I don't have anything to share from this wedding, luckily I've got something else to show you.

On Wedneday just been I had the honour of being a driver for the wedding of Rachel and Robin on a 39 degree day, this meant I got to hang out with Robin and the groomsmen all day, and as a result I managed to get a few nice photos. I wasn't the photographer in any official capacity, but I was tasked with taking a few shots of the groomsmen's "secret event" on the morning of the wedding. Shrouded in mystery we drove as a convoy of 2 cars at 9 am, cars filled with a groom, 6 groomsmen, and a handsome devil of a driver / photographer. Before I reveal the secret event I feel a little background is in order. Robin spent 4 years playing basketball at college in America 10 years ago, since that time he's led 2 lives with 2 sets of friends, separated by the Pacific Ocean and an 18 hour time zone difference, this wedding represented the coming together of 2 worlds. One common link between these worlds was basketball, 3 of his groomsmen were college team mates, 2 were Australians who love the game and the other a Swedish brother in law who perhaps didn't have quite the same experience but was up for anything.

The groomsmen were led to a basketball court and presented with special team Groomsmen singlets before indulging in an hour or so of hoops. It was perfect. The pressure and stress of getting everything perfect for the day instantly melted away and everyone was 21 years old again without a care in the world.

With 6 groomsmen plus a groom making 7 it was clear another player was required for some 4 on 4. The time had come to put down the camera and unleash the fury of a man 10 years past him prime who was never that good to start with.

WIth "official" duties over I could relax. I had my camera handy so took a few shots through the day, but as a disclaimer I didn't have my photographer's hat on so I just shot from where I happened to be positioned as opposed to roaming freely (but discretetly) to get better angles.

(this first shot was of the groomsman Matt, he was under strict instructions from his wife not to smile too hard as it's such a lot of teeth for the viewer to deal with- I think you've got a beautiful smile Matt!!)

Probably the best speeches I've heard at a wedding, tender, funny, real, loving - hardly a dry eye in the house.

Just a quick one for the photographers out there, the light for the speeches was minimal and the last 3 shots were taken at ISO6400, f/2.8, 1/60th with no tripod or flash, absolutely amazing what the 5DmkII can produce, it blows my mind!!

I'm now back in Adelaide indefinitely and taking bookings for weddings and portraits, if you're interested or know someone who is please get in touch on the email address at the top of the page and I can give you a few more details.

The good things

2009-12-28T04:04:00.003Z

It's amazing how quickly you start taking things for granted. Since being home for just over a fortnight I pretty much expect the weather to be clear, sunny and warm every day, and so far it hasn't let me down. At the risk of being Captain Obvious there are a lot of differences between Adelaide and London, and you have to take the good with the bad. Since I've been gone the cost of living over here has exploded, so much so that at current exchange rates London is cheaper than Adelaide for just about everything except for accommodation, that was unexpected. Getting stuff like a mobile phone, or home broadband is confusing and expensive here too, and websites like Amazon don't even exist! Also, there's spiders everywhere.

But the flipside is pretty compelling, and I've been trying to focus on that. The aforementioned perfect weather is a good place to start, but that's the tip of the iceberg, some world class wineries are an hour's drive away (Barossa Valley & McClaren Vale), and the Adelaide Hills wineries are closer still. The beach is 25 minutes away and is free and usable 24 hours a day (it stays pretty warm here at night, I was a guest at a wedding last week and the temperature was still 37 degrees at 10pm). Tennis courts are plentiful and free also, I managed to give Danny a 6-2 lesson the other week for the record, and obviously being surrounded by family and friends has also been amazing, although I am looking forward to moving into my own place next month. Quite a lot actually.

Here's a few shots from last week's trip to the Barossa, I headed down with my cousin Scott and his special lady Sierra, it was by no means an actual photo shoot, but when people are this good looking you just have to take their photo between tastings!

This morning I headed down to the beach with my good friends Andy and Kez (if you recall my Barbados blog these were the guys I was staying with) and their 4 month of German Short Haired Pointer named Herman (Herman the German). You're allowed to walk your dog without a leash before 10am so they decided to give Herman a bit of freedom to mingle with other dogs. Absolute pandemonium. Imagine a 6 year old with attention deficit disorder who's spent the last 3 hours drinking red cordial and eating chocolate - then multiply it by about 50. It was super tough to get any photos at all that were in focus, it was basically impossible to predict where he was going next, and there were about a million other dogs all try to get in on the action, but I did manage to take these before I put the camera away and just enjoyed the walk.

(Kez LOVES cleaning so much she was thrilled Herman left her something to clean while she was out of the house. Almost as much fun as cleaning tiles before regrouting)

Merry Christmas y'all

2009-12-25T09:53:00.003Z

Merry Christmas internet! My gift to you is the gift of knowledge, passed on in my last 2 instructional posts, this information will no doubt prove invaluable should you wish to give your parents a heart attack or smuggle excess baggage on a long haul flight. Information is the gift that keeps on giving.

Last night we had Dad's side of the family's Christmas bash, a great night of catching up with seldom seen relatives, sampling home made beers and wines and stuffing ourselves full of amazing food. Dad's one of 5 kids and because the venue of Christmas gets rotated each year the last time I was at this house was 5 years ago. Or at least it would have been if I wasn't snowboarding in Austria. My count back concluded that I'd not been to Chris and Jo's house in 10 years. I'm pretty sure I was wearing a hyper colour t-shirt last time I was there (although surely I wasn't wearing hyper colour at age 21? SURELY!?!) It was the perfect venue for a great night, nesstled in the southern Adelaide Hills surrounded by gum trees and wilderness it was the polar opposite of my time in London and I loved it! (as a side note this time last year I was also somewhere pretty amazing, taking in the Northern Lights in Norway - if you scroll down this post a bit you'll see some photos)

We got all bar 3 cousins in for this photo, one of the most complete shots we've had in recent years (or perhaps not, I just assume because I've not been there no one has!). Anyway, here's my extremely good looking family.

It's funny, when a family is young and kids are running round everywhere Christmas is a magical time of gifts and excitement, but as the kids become adults their aunties and uncles stop giving them presents and the gifting skips a generation. It all becomes about this guy, a handsome devil of a 91 year old I call Grandpa.

And here are the kids of the family....

Everyone loves a cheesy fake laughter photo (although this one almost looks real doesn't it?)

Today we had a low key lunch with the immediate family and Mum's mum. I took the chance to experiment with a bit of off camera flash using my 580EXII as the on camera master (bounced off the ceiling set at -1 exposure) and Dad's 430EXII as the slave to the right. It's a pretty subtle effect but I was really pleased with how the lighting turned out.

Have a good one all!!

How to surprise your parents

2009-12-22T09:36:00.003Z

In this week's installment of "how to" you will learn an excellent method of surprising your parents.

Here are the steps.

Step 1: Tell them you won't be home from overseas till after Christmas
Step 2: Tell them a friend will be dropping round Christmas presents a few weeks before Christmas
Step 3: Get your friend to have your parents help carry the presents from the car boot
Step 4: Jump out of the car boot

Here's how it works in practice.

Stay tuned for some shots I took at the Barossa today, they'll be up real soon.

How to take 60kg on a plane

2009-12-16T20:51:00.000Z

I'm onto my third glass of French fine wine in the British Airways lounge at Heathrow, an hour from now I'll be climbing into my Business Class seat, enjoying my welcome Champagne, then locking down for the 24 hour flight home to Adelaide. For good. I'm looking pretty composed and suitably attired in my polo shirt and jeans, a very different figure to the disheveled sweaty hobo getting frisked at security not less than 40 minutes ago.

Let me explain.

After nearly 7 years of travelling the globe I've accrued quite a few frequent flyer points. The majority of these were during 2003 when I took over 20 flights through 5 continents on my Qantas one world ticket, I couldn't beleive the price then and I still can't now, all up I paid AU$3800 for 12 full months of outlandish globetrotting including all applicable taxes. Another big chunk came on my flight home in April this year, a return flight I picked up for just £380 including taxes. I say these things not to gloat (okay, well, partially to gloat) but to draw your attention to the benefits of being patient, thinking things through, and enjoying the spoils of a well thought out plan. I had options to blow these points over the years, don't you worry about that, but I've saved them till now and cashed them all in on a one way Business Class seat London-Adelaide which goes for circa £4000 (AU$7500) and I plan to enjoy it! The total of cost of all the flights I've taken to earn these points is significantly less than £4000 (and I've had some sweet trips as a result!)

The luggage limit on Qantas Business Class (via Europe) is 30kg, only 7kg more than what you get on Ecomony these days. I had 5 and half years of UK life to pack into these bags so I had to make it count. Yesterday a man came to pick up 4 boxes of crap I'd put together, I'll see that in 12 weeks, but today was all about getting 60kg of luggage onto that plane without additional costs. Here's how I did it.

1. Pack heavy stuff into the boxes which are shipped, they are measured my volume not weight. If you won't need something heavy in the next 12 weeks put it in a box.

2. Wear as much as possible onto the plane. I faced quite the quandry this evening. I like wearing track suit pants on a plane rather than jeans, but the Business Class lounge has a dress code which trackies don't meet. Solution? Wear jeans on top of your trackies and remove on plane. Another problem, my bags weighed far too much. Solution? Wear a 2nd pair of trackies over your jeans. Triple layer baby. The guard frisking me at security must have though I was one complex carbohydrate. I also had on 2 T-shirts, 2 jumpers and a third draped over my shoulders.

3. Derren Brown the person at check in into overlooking your 36kg of check in luggage. I had all sorts of crazy plans with this, about asking an inane question right before he checked the weights "Sooooo, is the plane full? Did I mention I'm relocating to Australia? Have you ever seen a kangaroo?". But when push came to shove I didn't have the stones, fortunately the system gave him a taste of Derren Brown by telilng him I'd have to pick bags up at Sydney and re-check them in. This caused him to lose his train of thought and overlook my excess baggage.

4. Push your luck on the size of your bags you carry on. The limit is a strict 7kg per bag. Ignore it. My carry on back pack chock full of cameras and lenses weighs in at over 15kg fully loaded (including laptop) and my other carry on suit bag was easily 10 (and probably slightly bigger than it should have been). Unless it's ridiculous no one will challenge this. The guys at security just want to make sure you're not packing bombs, the guys at check it just want you in and out as quickly as possible, it's the ultimate situation of everyone assuming the other person will pick you up on it. NOTE - ignore this advice if you're flying Ryanair or another low cost carrier, they do check.

Oooh, take off is soon, gotta run, might finish this 36000 feet above see level.....

.....Okay, so now I'm in the lounge at Changi airport, Singapore. Can't quite remember where I got up to in the first half 12 hours ago but I'll try and continue.

I'll take this opportunity to summarise what it's like to fly long haul on Business Class as there's a pretty good chance I'll never do it again and the memories are fresh in my mind. It's basically like a classier version of a lazy Saturday afternoon at home that goes on for longer. Here are the key points of both:

Saturday afternoon at home
Couch
Napping
Beer
Pizza
Movies / TV / sport on demand (I'll miss Sky)
Flatmates might bring you a beer if you're lucky and treat you with contempt (all in good humour of course)

Business Class long haul
Super comfy chair that extends into a bed
Napping
Fine wine
Fancy food (I had the king prawn and pearl mushrooms with rice and stir fried vegies as my main and went with the salmon to start)
Movies / TV / sport on demand
People bring you everything and treat you with respect

Seat Adjustments

I had a pretty unusual sensation of flying backwards. The seats are configured to maximise shoulder room so each set of 2 has the passengers facing each other diagonally and tapers in at the legs. I also saw possibly the most beautiful sun bursting through clouds with islands below scene I've witnessed on a plane, I managed to snap this photo on the iphone but I was about 3 minutes late and the best of it was well and truly gone.

It's weird, I haven't fully digested the whole prospect of moving home for good. I thought it would have hit me by now but it just hasn't. My final few weeks in London were so hectic sorting out all the small stuff that I didn't have time to think about the big stuff, and the months before that had issues of their own that were taking up pretty much all of my conscious thought. I guess by the time I actually post this blog I'll have had a bit more of a chance to mull over the future and just how much life will change. Ooh, looks like I've gotta go board again, might finish this in the air or maybe wait till I get home....

....okay, so now I've been home for 3 days, caught up with a few people and had a chance to adjust to Adelaide life. It's great, there's no people anywhere cramping your space, you can hear birds in the morning, it's sunny and pleasant and you can get a cleanskin bottle of wine at Dan Murphy's for $1.99 (circa £1). Haven't tried one of these bottles yet but am pretty intrigued to see what mysteries they hold! The highlight of the final leg of the trip home was sitting behind a celebrity on the Sydney / Adelaide leg (when you fly business class you're pretty much rubbing shoulders with important people on a daily basis so this was really no big deal to me...). Now, I didn't see this celeb when she sat down, but everyone that walked past had a good look at her and quite a few said hello as though they knew her. From what I could gather she had blonde hair, skinny arms and a striped top, my mind was racing, surely she was some sort of mega babe, a famous model perhaps just waiting for a strapping fellow business class passenger to make his presence known? I almost leant over the top of the seat and gave her a spideman kiss but decided it might be miscontrued as a sexual offence and wanted to keep my name off the offender's register.

Yeah, so it turned out to be (former) Senator Natasha Stott Despoja, probably best I trusted my spidey senses and remained in my seat.

The plan now I'm back is to send this photography business into overdrive, so if you've managed to get this far down (well done by the way) and are looking for a photographer (or know someone who is) then get in touch!

Awesome.

Anytime Shoot: Anyela and Shane

2009-12-13T00:29:00.007Z

Last weekend I had the pleasure of taking Anyela and Shane on a photo shoot round my London hood of Old Street. Those who've been there will know that it's the exact opposite of the stunning parks, gardens and traditional old houses that you'd expect to see in London, it's more urban, edgy, and interesting. It was great to shoot a couple in a different environment and foreced me to look at scenes in a different way. I also used Shane's Nikon D300 as I wanted to have a crack with a nice Nikon to compare against my Canon 5D mkII, the controls are pretty different but equally intuative, the camera as fast, repsonsive, focussed well and produced sharp vibrant images. It basically confirmed my suspicion that Nikon and Canon are so close to identical it makes no difference what you use.

In case you're wondering, Anyela is Columbian and her and Shane don't mind getting into a little salsa dancing from time to time!

If you want to see the full set head on over to my Facebook Page, why not become a "fan" while you're there?

Alternatively you can check out a photo slideshow here.

Wet and wild weekend

2009-11-29T16:18:00.004Z

Another crazy London weekend for Simon Bills of simonbills.com fame. Friday night saw a Movember house party at our Old St flat where my flat mate Dave was awarded Mo of the match by myself. A magnum of MOet was presented (or maybe it was just a magnum of Waitrose champagne, either way it was pretty tasty from what I remember) and much frivolity was enjoyed.

Mo of the Match from Simon Bills on Vimeo.

Saturday night was the farewell party for my Old Street Photography running mate Danny, he's heading back to Adelaide tomorrow with his wife Bec to see what life has in store for them there. I'll be following suit in the not too distant future too so stay tuned for details. We've agreed to disband Old Street Photography and branch out as individuals with our photography, soon enough there'll be 2 new players in the Adelaide wedding photography circuit so look out!!

I woke up exhasted this morning, never good, but the exhastion was replaced with excitement when I rememberd I was having brunch with Nej! Nej grew up 2 doors up the road from me and a ridiculously large portion of my childhood was spend with him playing basketball, or cricket, or table tennis, or kicking the footy, or swimming, or playing Tomb Raider or just chilling doing whatever, he lives up in Aberdeen these days but was down for the weekend to watch the Masters tennis so it was great to catch up over the biggest fry up I've ever seen.

So, one might imagine that after all this all I wanted to do was have a lie down, and I did want to, but for some reason I decided to head out and play with the video function on my Canon 5D2. Problem being it was absolutely bucketing with rain. I headed down to St Pauls and managed to get a few breaks in the weather before the following happened:

- the rain really started coming down hard
- I accidently walked through a massive puddle and soaked my shoes right through
- I cracked the shits and went to the get the bus home
- I waited 20 minutes at the shelter-less stop and stood unprotected in the pouring rain before the 76 finally arrived
- I rode the bus home for 20 minutes and got off to clear skies

Anyway, I've whipped the footage I took into the following video but it's very much a work in progress.

I'll be back.

Best "Movember - Man on the Street" video EVER

2009-11-26T13:10:00.007Z

On Sunday my flatmate Gerhard and I headed out to Camden to do something quite unusual. As Danny put it, this really took some "stones".

The stones were actually all Gerhard's to be fair, I was more in the background, but it sure was fun. You see, Gerhard is taking part in Movember this year which involves growing a Mo (or a 'tache as they call them in the UK) for the month of November to raise money and aweness for prostate cancer and men's health issues generally. After 3 weeks of abuse regarding the almost invisible mo Gerhard decided to take it to the streets and see what the general public thought. Take a look to see what the verdict was.

Movember Man on the Street from Dave Gerhard on Vimeo.

For the camera heads out there I was doing the recording on my 5D mkII, first time I'd really used the video function, focussing was a bit tricky but there's loads of potential and HD quality is off the hook.

If you've been inspired by Gerhard's stones or his mustache growing ablilties then I know he'd love your support, you can donate to his charity of choice here.

Engagement Shoot - Leona and Josh

2009-11-22T12:51:00.003Z

Yesterday I was under the pump.

Most people I shoot have a passing interest in photography at best, they know what they like but don't know their f stops from their ISO - which is brilliant! You see, when people aren't heavily into something they're easier to impress, a nice bokeh (blurry creamy dreamy background) and a smiling face is generally all it takes (FYI I don't just settle for mediocre when I shoot in case you thought I was just phoning it in!). Yesterday was a different kettle of fish, Josh is very keen photographer, and his fiance Leona is a full time working pro! No pressure Simon!! The flipside is that Josh is one of my best mates, and Leona is one of the happiest least judgmental people going around, and together they have so much energy and chemistry and fun that it's super easy to get great shots. Still though, I was under the pump.

If you want to see the full selection head on over to my under contrcution photography website and check out the slideshow and page I've set up. I'm pretty chuffed with it but would LOVE to hear what y'all think.

Awesome.

Eye of the beholder

2009-11-15T11:54:00.006Z

Over the years I've taken a lot of photos of the London Eye. 2 of my previous day jobs were within a short walk of the eye, and while I was learning the ropes of photography this was a favourite subject. Apologies for the varying sizes below, don't have the time to standardise the size so bear with me!

2006

2007

2008

2009

But after all these shots over all these I'd never actually been up the Eye. That is, until now. Last weekend we had some unseasonal clear weather and the decision was made early Saturday morning to break the drought. THe light was good, the skies were clear apart from some nice fluffy clouds and conditions were perfect. I think my favourite shot of the day had nothing to do with the Eye though.

Good times.

Hecticity

2009-11-13T13:43:00.003Z

Hecticity - look it up, it's a word. And if wasn't 20 seconds ago then it is now (welcome anyone who found this page by googling hecticity, I like your style). This word basically sums up my life at the moment, ie, my life is a state of high hecticity.

Far be it from me to make excuses, but my tardiness in updating my blog is due to the aforementioned condition. Just a quick summary of my last few weeks starting as far back as my memory will go:
Thursday: Rigorous sporting contest followed by birthday drinks and the last train home
Friday: Welcome night in, tasty dinner followed by my favourite movie of all time on the couch, The Big Lewbowski. (okay, so this isn't making my life sound tooooo hectic)
Saturday: Trip on the London Eye (stay tuned for this blog, some KILLER shots even if I do say so myself) and walking round London followed by a trip to Essex for dinner and a sleep over
Sunday: Trip back from Essex followed by drinks, karaoke and a very late dinner with friends
Monday: Finished the last of my wedding photo editing, homecooked meal and a sensational bottle of Italian wine that needed to be drunk
Tuesday: Something so hectic I can't even remember it 3 days later
Wednesday: Dinner and drinks with friends at a fantastic restaurant on the Thames (followed by nightmares of being attacked by restless farm animals after eating so much steak)
Thursday: Sleeping Beauty ballet at the Royal Opera House - apparently it's cool for Prime Charming to kiss unconcious girls, but suddently it becomes a police matter when I try it at a party?
Friday (today): Rogue wine club (mmmmmmmm)
Saturday: Leaving party dinner and drinks
Sunday: Pub lunch followed by photo taking round London and possibly karaoke again?
Monday: Dinner some place nice
Tuesday: Emotional airport farewell and REST

On top of that I've actaully been fronting up to my day job as well, so as you can see I've had precious little opportunity to blog it up, and it'll probably be a little while before the next installment.

What I'm trying to say is stay tuned, I've not forgotten about you, I still love you, my weekly updates will resume once my life returns to a normal level of hecticity.

Simon

Getting away from it all

2009-11-01T22:16:00.006Z

London life can get you down. Super fast paced, overcrowded, too much pollution, too many people who think it's acceptable to do a poo on your doorstep on a Saturday night (seriously, don't get me started, that's 2 weeks out of 3 now - the downside to living in gritty East London I guess). Sometimes you just have to get away from it all.

Yvonne and I had been planning a trip to Turkey for a while, but when I say "planning" I actually mean "not planning". There was much talk of the trip, but due to the aforementioned super fast paced life we'd not booked flights or accommodation, or even considered where we might go and we were due to leave in under a week. Turkey deserves better than that, so the decision was made to hire a car and explore some of the English countryside instead, a decision which turned out to be a good one.

We had the car in London for one night before heading off so I did something I've been wanting to do for a while, I rigged up a tripod in the passenger seat and fired off some long exposure shots of me behind the wheel. There's plenty of info online about how to do this, but in a nutshell here are the settings I used for the shot below. f/22, ISO1600, 4 seconds exposure. Not sure if this is how the rest of the world does it, and I'm sure with a little experimentation I could do a better job, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Next stop was the Three Choirs Vineyard near Gloucester, about 3 hours out of London. Yeah, that's right, England has vineyards! Who knew? The place was stunning, beautiful rooms with beautiful views of beautiful vines.

A little wine tasting seemed to be in order. At first I thought a whacky chef was playing a pre-halloween prank by substiting one of the wines for vinegar, sadly this wasn't the case, but it actually didn't matter at all. Strange as it might sound the wine was the last reason we went there, I mean with France, Spain and Italy on your doorstep there's never a shortage of great wine over here (sidenote - I picked up a bottle of Vevue Clicquot for £25 at the supermarket yesterday, same bottle goes for $80+ in Australia), we went to Three Choirs for the early morning strolls in crisp fresh air through rows of vines whose leaves have just turned with the seasons, we went to see cows and sheep going about thier business, and we went because we considered it highly unlikely anyone would do a poo on our door step. Oh, and the photo ops weren't bad either.

Next up was a trip to Chepstow Castle just over the border in Wales. In my relentless pursuit to see more things you'll never see in Australia (Kryall Castle doesn't count) I actually forgot that I'd been to this castle before. Oops. Not to worry, it's always great poking round an ancient structure, an a Tuesday night on the verge of winter meant the crowds were down. I love the light streaming in through the windows of castles, especially on a gorgeous girl!

Cream tea later that day followed by Bath the following day and a trip to Stonehenge on the way home rounded out a world class short break. Londoners, heed my advice and get out of town of a few days, sure, the stress of London will come right back the second you try to negitiate London traffic on your return, but a few days out of the big smoke is just magic.

Prime Time with Mum and Dad at Kew Gardens

2009-10-20T20:44:00.004+01:00

Another weekend, another crazy adventure, this time my cohorts were none other than MUM and DAD!! (and Yvonne of course). The parentals saw their way clear to spend a whole 2 days with their 2nd born son as part of another 5 week epic Euro vacation (bring on retirement I say!) and it was great hosting them at my Old Street Studio (which is actually my flat).

So, an unprecedented 3 sets of brackets in my opening paragraph, I get the feeling this is going to be a classic blog entry (or is it?). Anyway, we cracked some bubbly upon their arrival, nothing like a bottle of Bollinger on a Saturday afternoon, before heading off for dinner and a show - Chicago. We were all pretty bushwhacked after the day so retired early in anticipation of a busy Sunday.

We'd planned many moons ago to pay a visit to Kew Gardens on the Sunday, and after some early clouds we were blessed with a perfect London autumn day, the ideal conditions for 2 generations of Bills men to go head to head in an intense, unspoken photographic competition. Dad's a photographer from way back, when he was my age he took Mum and a MASSIVE heavy hardcase camera bag filled with manual focus prime (non-zoom) lenses on a trip round Europe, back then people didn't have the luxury of zooms, if you wanted a wide focal range you brought a lot of lenses, simple as that. Lenses like my SIgma 18-200 were an unspoken luxury.

It's interesting though how things come full circle.

I've been thinking a lot lately about shooting with prime lenses and using them for weddings, but there's a lot to consider. The benefits include superior image quality and wider apertures which allow better low light shooting and incredibly narrow depth of field which opens up some great artistic opportunities. The downside is that they're less practical, you need to move your feet to get the framing right which isn't always possible - if you need to move back to fit everything in but there's a wall behind you then you have to change lenses, a 10 second process that could cause you to miss the moment. Another downside is that they're EXPENSIVE (well, the ones I want are at least!) and it's hard to justify spending vasty sums of money on lenses when I already have the those focal ranges covered in my top of the line Canon zooms. The third and final reason I don't use them for weddings is because I don't own any, apart from my Canon 50 f/1.8 which I would never use at a wedding due to the slow focussing.

So, what do prime lenses have to with beating my Dad in a Kew Gardens photo competition? Well, I decided to only shoot primes on Sunday, I brought along my nifty 50 and I managed to get my hands on a Canon 100m f/2.8 MACRO lens courtesy of my main man Danny "Z Score" Zada (funny side story - I picked the lens up from Danny on Saturday, I found him at a quiet pub near his house where he'd popped down to watch his beloved Chelsea, the problem is he lives just near Emirates Stadium and Arsenal were playing later that day, so instead of enjoying a quiet pint with a neutral crowd the pub was packed to the rafters with rabid Arsenal fans all gunning for Aston Villa!). I lent Dad my Canon 24-70 for the day, so he was equipped with some very tidy glass of his own. The scene was set, battle lines were drawn, here's what we came up with.

The following shots are mine:

(this one was shot at ISO 25,600 in the 5D mkII for you photographers out there)

And here's what Dad brought to the table:

And here's one of Mum we combined on, mine's the left - I think Dad's is better actually, and it pains me to type it!!

All round a tremendous weekend, made all the better by some first class steaks and tasty wines for dinner. Is there anything better than taking photos with your Dad on a crisp Autumn day in one of London's most beautiful gardens when the leaves are turning?

Wedding: Lara and David

2009-10-13T18:21:00.003+01:00

I'd been sick all week, and restless night were filled with fevered dreams of the wedding I had to shoot on Sunday. My health improved slightly as the week progressed, but I was far from 100% when Sunday rolled round so I was glad to at least be on familiar territory. Danny and I returned to the fantastic Montague on the Gardens hotel in Russell Square where the familiar sight of Gerhard and team were there to greet us, this time for the wedding of Lara and David, and what a wedding it turned out to be!

First of all let me say a massive thanks to Lara and David for being such an awesome couple to shoot, they'd allocated us plenty of time to shoot and as a result we were able to get some great unique shots. This was the smallest wedding we've done with just 25 guests, but less is more as far as I"m concerned, the day had a very intimate feel throughout and gave everyone the chance to spend some quality time with the couple.

It was my turn to take shots of the groom getting ready (for whatever reason I usually end up shooting the bride) so it was great to try something different. While Danny was hitting home run after home run with his bridal shots (seriously, these shots are amazing) I took the groom and his parents down to the park for some casual portraits.

(David's Swiss parents loved the squirrels in the park, and so did I - I still get a kick out of seeing them running round!)

The ceremony was held in a small atrium, a perfect little glass ceilinged room full of natural light. And love.

Following the ceremony we took the formals before getting the whole group together outside for a shot. I was standing precariously on a narrow wall next the BBQ for this one!

While everyone settled in for lunch I was feverishly working away on the laptop putting together a slideshow for later on. This was the first time I've done this and I'm convinced this has to be a regular thing moving forwards, having shots to show the couple on the day is great, and it's a perfect way to make the reception guests who weren't at the ceremony feel involved in the whole day. Once I had the shots from the first part of the day sorted dinner was finished and we headed out with just the couple for some coupley shots. As luck would have it light rain was coming down, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches so we grabbed some umbrellas and set about making some memories.

As you can see the sun came out right at the end, the perfect end to a perfect wedding. Ok, who am I kidding, we all know the slideshow was the perfect end to the perfect wedding!

I suck at Oktoberfest

2009-10-05T10:49:00.005+01:00

It's official. I suck at Oktoberfest.

I came to this conclusion on Saturday night, some time around 11, when I retired to my hostel bed stone cold sober having just waded through the debris of a Munich on the final weekend of the beer festival. That's not to say I didn't have my fair share of litre steins earlier in the day, but at some point my sensible switch kicked in and I decided to hit the cokes instead, I even had a coffee at 10:30!! Worst. Party animal. Ever.

In cruel twist of fate I actually picked up some sort of bug which has rendered me housebound today, I was in a bad way before the drugs kicked in, I even shed a few tears when Flower (head meerkat) was killed by a cobra on Meerkat Manor this morning (and then I announced this fact to the world on my blog - this fever is brutal).

There were 13 of us who made the trip over, most of whom arrived late Friday night, but my flatmate Dave and I arrived early Friday afternoon.

(As a sidenote if you're intestered in the back story to our trip which was named - codename Operation Beardvaria - you can check out this post on Dave's blog.) My initial plan was to leave the SLR at home, I mean, a big camera is pretty much the last thing you want to have to worry about in a beer fueled environment, but when I thought about it I realised I'd have Friday afternoon and Sunday morning to take photos, so in went the 40D and Sigma 18-200 (not an amazing lens optically, but it's super handy for traveling and capable of some pretty decent results). We spent Friday afternoon cruising round trying to capture the spirit of Oktoberfest with our cameras, for you Adelaideans out there imagine the Royal Show only with bigger and better rides, and instead of halls selling showbags they have halls filled with people drinking steins of beer, instead of the animals they have tents of people drinking beer, and instead of car demonstrations they have, well, you get the idea.

I wanted to practice a technique knowns as shooting from the hip, which, as the name suggests, involves holding the camera by your waist and shooting people who aren't aware they're having their photo taken. It's obviously pretty hit and miss, but I love the results you can get with a bit of luck.

And then there was the chaos of Saturday...

I had a bit of time to explore Munich along on Sunday, my flight was mid afternoon while Dave was off at the crack of dawn to get his flight (quite the valiant effort after a disrupted sleep night before). I was here 2 years ago so it was interesting to see familiar sights. The morning light was glorious and after spending a bit of time shooting downtown I decided to see if surf was up at the stationary wave. It was.

I'll leave you with my favourite image of the weekend, enjoy!

Oh, by the way, I'm still on the lookout for some Paris models, come on people, get on board!

Models required for PARIS PHOTO SHOOT!!

2009-09-29T22:38:00.003+01:00

Friends, I'm on the lookout for a fun couple keen to head over to Paris for a photo shoot on Monday 19th October.

You:
- Fun couple who like having their photo taken
- Happy to spend a fair bit of time posing for photos
- Can get yourselves to Paris on Monday 19th October (I'll be getting an early train from London and a late train back, circa £79 return)
- Want to make friends jealous with stunning photos in the world's most romantic city

Me:
- Looking to build a truly international portfolio
- Loves going on photo shoots like the one in the video below.

Drop me an email if you're interested simon.bills (at )gmail.com

Photographer Simon Bills in action from Simon Bills on Vimeo.

The man behind the stories behind the photos of Simon Bills of Old Street Photograhy

2009-09-27T21:47:00.003+01:00

On Saturday my good friend and Old Street Photography running mate Danny whipped up his patented chilli con carne and had Yvonne and I round for dinner. As the light was so nice we decided to come round a bit earlier and head to a little park down the road where roles were reversed and I fulfilled a childhood fantasy of becoming a super model.

About a month ago I took Danny and his wife Bec out for a shoot around London, we both thought it was pretty important to experience what it feels like to be on the other side of the lens to improve how we relate to the couple we're shooting, at the end of the day once you've got your technical wings photographing people is ALL about building rapport with your models, making them feel comfortable and getting them laughing and smiling naturally and enjoying themselves. I'm notoriously rubbish at having my photo taken, I tend to get a bit camera shy, can't smile naturally and generally get a bit awkward - I'm the camera shy photographer - but NO MORE!!

It's a lot easier having your photo taken with someone else, the style that Danny and both shoot is basically getting the couple to relax and have fun with each other - we're just shooting a couple of hanging out (sort of, there's more to it than that but you get the idea). It's a not a structured "Stand here, look at the camera, smile, NEXT". After we'd done some couple shots it was time to go solo, but this was fine as I was used to the camera pointing at me by now and my smile was looking less like a grimace than ever before!

So, I present to you..... me!

Wedding: Chona and Richard

2009-09-20T12:36:00.006+01:00

Keen followers of my blog will remember Chona and Rich, a couple I met at J-Fo's party many moons ago who were looking for a wedding photographer. Well, those many moons came and went, and yesterday Danny and I finally shot the wedding, and what a wedding it was.

The standard chaos of a wedding day was in full effect, Chona's make up artist was caught in traffic and couldn't make it on time, it was looking like she'd have to have her make up done en route in the wedding car which was far from ideal. Thankfully the bridesmaids had a different make up artist who stepped in and saved the day, crisis averted. (Chona - I didn't catch the details of the make-up artist savior, drop me an email and I'll put her details in!!).

Chona had a stunning dress made by Kosibah Creations, the dressmaker Yemi was on hand all day to make sure the dress was looking perfect for the photos which certainly made our job a bit easier!

Once the early drama was over with the day unfolded beautifully, speeches were great (particularly liked Rich's younger brother's speech which likened Rich's approach to being an older brother to Wayne Arnold from the Wonder Years). Some early delays cut into some photo taking time (the planned 45 minutes turned into 6!) but in the spirit of rolling with the punches we all pulled together and got some great images.

Barbados revisited in a new and improved way

2009-09-16T21:27:00.006+01:00

In typical simonbills.com fashion I'm breaking convention yet again, 2 blogs in 2 days if you don't mind. Yep.

So, this evening I spent a bit of time playing round in Lightroom setting up some presets to automate the export of photos in a blog friendly manner, I think this new way of presenting the images looks a bit classier. I'm all about automating things and creating shortcuts when it comes to life (not the type of shortcuts that involve buying cheap fire extinguishers and never testing them, I'm talking about the good kind of shortcut), so I'd rather spend 2 hours setting something up and saving 5 minutes 100 times over the next year. What better way to check out how these new shots look on the blog than to put them on the blog? So, enjoy, here are a few more shots from Barbados last month.

Thoughts?

Sheep and dogs and stuff

2009-09-15T20:57:00.004+01:00

What a weekend! Mum wins the US Open, Dad loses it (to a 20 year old kid no less), and sheep number 3 wins the annual Sheeplechase at the Pet Personality Awards in Regents Park. I really don't know which result was the most surprising.

From Regents Park

The weekend began with one of those moments, you know the ones, where you're lying in bed half asleep and the radio comes on and tells you something that can't possibly be true, and through the haze of semi consciousness you kind of fill in the gaps yourself. I had this experience a touch over 8 years ago when I woke to September 11, and now on September 12, 2009 I woke to the news that "Kim Clijsters is through to the US Open final after her semi final was stopped early when Serena Williams threatened to KILL A LINE JUDGE". The full story, while still excellent, isn't quite is crazy as I'd imagined it to be. The rest of the day sort of went down hill when I popped into the office to pump out a few hours work which ended up taking all day, and as luck would have it I'm pretty sure that was the last good day we're having in London this year (I walked home in the dark rain tonight FYI).

But Sunday was a new day and I was excited to catch up with Siobhan and Shane, friends I met on a photography course years ago and whom I'd not seen for way too long (you remember Shane, right? He was my 2nd shooter at this wedding). We decided to meet for a picnic in the park if the weather was good or a Sunday roast at a pub if the weather was not good. The weather was not good. After much searching we stumbled upon a great little pub just off Marylebone High Street which served roasts as delicious as they were expensive (at £14.95 you know that these were some tasty roasts). Over the course of our feed the conditions outside improved marginally so we decided to take to the park and see what we could see. I think you can imagine our delight when we found a flyer advertising the Pet Personality Awards.

I'd packed my trusty 40D and 18-200 combo, not my best lens optically but certainly my most versatile with the 11x zoom, I was super pleased I'd taken this option over the 5D and 24-70 when I learned there would be dogs running through courses in a time trial format. We sort of caught the end of this so I didn't get as many shots I would have liked but it was fun to just see something so random up close.

But there was more to come. Oh yes. There was a celebrity afoot. Not the type of celebrity you'd see the paparazzi outside the house of, but a celebrity of sorts. Of course I'd never heard of her, but then again I didn't watch Britain's Got Talent. If you did, or if you're one of the 1.4 million people who's seen her video on youtube you'll recognise her as "that girl that does tricks with her dog", but I prefer the correct terminology - Canine Freestyle.

She's got a few new tricks up her sleeve, including the speccy that Aussie Rules aficionados will appreciate.

>

The thing I really liked about this dog though was the respect he gave other performers, I mean just look at the attention he's giving to the Sheeplechase.

So all round a great weekend that was over way too soon. This weekend sees Danny and I re-unite to take on an awesome wedding, I'm getting super pumped about this one, white "black cab" as the wedding car, double decker bus taking guests from wedding to reception, great couple and great reception venue, this is going to be great!

My annual night of clubbing

2009-09-06T14:45:00.005+01:00

Every once in a while, perhaps 12 months or so, I find myself enthusiastically agreeing to hit a London club in search of good times, carefree dancing and, well, more good times. And, like clockwork, each year I also find myself wondering why I thought it would be fun this time and why so many people go to these clubs.... while I eat a kebab and chips, or some chicken nuggets as was the case last night, on my couch at 2am, ears still ringing.

But perhaps I'm being harsh, the night on the whole was a lot of fun, but that was more to do with catching up with friends from the canal boat trip and spending a few hours at the comedy cafe. (Note to any comedy club owners who happen to be stopping by simonbills.com - resist the temptation to allow stag parties to come into your club, it might be 20 extra bums on seats but it results in 100 other punters who''ll never come back after having the show largely ruined by a bunch of lads trying to out do each other with brainless heckles). In a moment of brilliant foresight one of our party had taken the initiative to get our names on the door of at the club, that's right, no line up for us. Problem was our names weren't actually on the door when we showed up, and after 20 minutes of investigation it become apparent that she had added our names to an Australian club of the same name. I'm sure the doorman at Sydney's Cargo was crestfallen when the 10 guests for Mr Reimers' leaving party were no shows.

So, why do I hate clubs? I guess it's the combination of music too loud to talk, room too dark to see and drinks too expensive to justify. I love a night at the pub, sitting round a table with friends supping a few pints or some tasty wine and discussing the reasons the world would be a better place if we were in charge, but when the chat is removed from the evening by intrusively loud music it's just not as fun.

But you didn't come here to hear my rabbit on about getting old and not understanding the kids of today did you? Here's a few pics I took yesterday at Greenwich (I love that place, there was a wedding right around where the first 2 photos were taken, I'd give my eye teeth to be that photographer, stunning timeless scenes everywhere just waiting to be shot). I've just been playing around with creating the these 3 image triptychs in Lightroom, I think they look pretty cool and they're easy to do quickly now I have my preset saved, look out for more in the future!

50 posts and 1 video

2009-09-01T19:46:00.007+01:00

Wow, I'm up to 50 posts now in this blog, who knew it had legs? (actually, I think we all probably knew it did, I mean, it's a socially acceptable way of being completely self indulgent which is right up my alley - especially when combined with photography!).

Speaking of being completely self indulgent I recently commissioned a video to be made about everyone's favorite subject - Simon Bills! I'm in the process of revamping my website and decided a video of me in action would be a great addition as it would allow prospective clients the opportunity to see how I work, and to show that a photo shoot is actually great fun and not a stressful experience. I was able to cajole my good friend and Old Street Photography business partner Danny and his delightful wife Bec into being my models, and boy did they come to the party, smiling faces, provocative poses, you name it, we all had an absolute blast and were lucky with some great light (although you create your own luck to an extent by shooting at the right time).

We got the ball rolling at St Pauls cathedral. I've been here loads of times (I used to walk past it several times a week on the way to work), but I'd never really paid much attention to the area at the top of the stairs. My goodness was this a perfect venue to start a shoot.

From Bec and Danny

From St Pauls we headed over the Millenium Bridge and down the South Bank to the London Eye. By the time we made it to the London Eye the earlier good light was a distant memory so we decided to grab some dinner and nail a Big Ben shot later that night. The plan was to shoot the Big Ben shot a bit earlier than we did to get a nice deep blue sky instead of the full black that we ended up with, but in the end a tasty dinner and great conversation got in the way of a great photo, which I think is fine as long as it's not a paid job!

I tried out a few new tricks to get poses and chemistry between the couple looking natural and intimate, wanna know what these tricks are? Book me for a shoot!

But now onto the most exciting part of the day, the video. My mate Steve is traveling around the world on a shoestring, but in his bag of tricks he possesses a video camera, a degree in film making, and a flair for putting together awesome little videos. It was a match made in heaven. Oh, and also mad props to the defunct masters of funk Superfit for providing the tunes, I heard a rumor of a reunion swirling round cyberspace, here's hoping it has legs. Check out the result below, I'm super stoked with it, what do you think? I'd also love some feedback on whether you have any delays in the video loading, I'm planning on hosting it on vimeo.com when the website's up and running but I need to make sure it's nice and quick for the visitors of the site.

Photographer Simon Bills in action from Simon Bills on Vimeo.

Island Paradise

2009-08-24T23:25:00.003+01:00

While the rest of you working stiffs are toiling away at your 9 to 5s I'm onto my third Banks of the evening watching monkeys run across the golf course having spent the afternoon scuba diving. Life is tough in Barbados.

Dinner is on the way (Andy's whipping up his famous jerk chicken I think?) so I've got a few moments to blog. The trip has been amazing thus far, and I've taken some cool photos, but the story I'm about to tell has nothing to with photography.

We'd just finished a sumptuous banquet of jerk chicken and grilled potatoes at Just Grillin' when we decided to take a walk along the boardwalk, then the beach to the Hilton. At the end of the boardwalk we had tired legs, and the temptation to turn back to the car wasn't helped by the rum punches consumed earlier, but we powered on in the spirit of adventure and healthy living, and it was a good thing we did. As we approached the end of our walk we noticed a couple of shady characters in the trees near the beach with red torches strapped to their heads, a few furtive glances were exchanged in the dark but we carried on up the beach and left them to their demented parlour games. 100m further down we saw 2 sets of tracks on the sand, one coming up from the water, then returning in into it, that's when the penny dropped (well, that's when it dropped for Andy, the rest of us were still in the dark). We hastily returned to the red head men to enquire what they were up to.

Barbados is currently in turtle-egg-laying-season. I'm sure there's a more succinct name for it but turtle-egg-laying-season will have to do. The men were part of a turtle protection society and they were standing behind a huge mother turtle overseeing her egg laying process and covering up the tracks and evidence right after to protect the eggs from poachers or hungry animals, and now we too were witnessing this amazing display of nature only a few feet away. This turtle must have been around 70-80cm (I've not wiki'd how big turtles get but it looked longer than 2 rulers but shorter than 3) and it was beautiful, the guys told us she was around 25-30 years of age which seemed pretty amazing, all these years I've been at school and uni and work and travelling this old girl was just swimming round the world's biggest swimming pool without a care in the world. I could go on about it, but I suspect it's one of those things you had to see, so I'll leave you with a few pics to go on with.

3 more days till I'm back to civilisation.

From Barbados Blog

Paparazzi Grasshopper

2009-08-18T18:45:00.007+01:00

There was commotion by the door, I stopped mid-sentence and ran full speed towards her, along with more paps than I'd seen in my life. Our cameras were prepared hours ago, manual focus, exposure and flash were set and locked in with duck tape, all for this very moment, there would be no mistakes. She had emerged.

If there's 1 thing I like about London, and there is more than 1 thing, but if there was just 1 thing, then it would probably be the fact that there is so much going on all the time. There are subcultures most people know nothing about, and subcultures within those subscultures that are even more clandestine. I mentioned last week about going the UK Air Guitar Championships, a prime example of such a group, but last night I managed to infiltrate a society that most people are aware of but seldom get to run with. Last night I was part of the paparazzi.

My contact, who wishes to be known only as "Miss S" is the girlfriend of a Guy I play basketball with. We got chatting after the game last week (we had a WAGS night which involved our wives and girlfriends watching us play followed by drinks and dinner at Elephant and Castle's classiest Weatherspoons) and it emerged she heads out 3 to 4 times a week as a pap. I think my unbridled enthusiasm was pretty obvious so she offered to take me out on a shoot (with the ulterior motive of picking my brain about wedding photography). 5 days later and I'm meeting her out the front on Bond Street station, just a short walk from Mayfair, which, if you've ever played monopoly you will know, is the fancy side of town.

"Miss S"

"Miss S" had contacted her agent and there wasn't much buzz at 10pm on this Monday night. Pearl Jam and the Arctic Monkeys were both playing in London so there was a chance some celebs would be out and about, but nothing was assured, we had to make out own luck. We did this by doing a whistlestop tour of all the swanky restaurants in the area (Gordon Ramsay @ Claridges plus a whole bunch of other ones I can't remember, if you're into that scene you'll know what they are, if you're not then the names will mean nothing) looking for other paps or big cars with tinted windows. There certainly isn't a shortage of impressive vehicles, Bentleys and Mercedes galore, each with a chauffeur waiting anxiously for their master to emerge, but if the windows aren't tinted super dark then they don't belong to someone famous and we don't want to photograph them. We're not in Shoreditch any more Toto.

This next paragraph is for the photographers out there so feel free to skip it if you're not interested in technical stuff. If you've ever wondered what settings, lenses and bodies paps use you're not alone. I've often pondered what special tricks they have up their sleeve to get that shot. So here it is folks, the moment you've been waiting for. Everything is set to manual, the exposure is set at 1/250th, f/8.0 and ISO 400, the focus is set to manual (about 2-3m, although I slightly cocked this up and set mine too close resulting in soft images - f/8.0 gives some room to move and the wide lens also helps put it all in focus). Flash is also set to manual, again set at 2-3m, I'd never really used my flash on manual before so this was a good learning experience, I discovered that the stofen diffuser I use to provide soft lighting at weddings takes away a lot of the light with is fine for ETTL but doesn't really work when shooting manual. I used some duck tape on the lens to make sure it didn't get bumped and change to Auto focus, you know, because I'm a pro now. Lens wise the wider the better. I had an image of paps using these long telephoto lenses all the time, but these days the technique is just to get right up in the celebs face and blast away, I used my 10-20 set at 18mm on my 40D cropped sensor. Anyway, back to the story.

Our final call on our tour was at Guy Ritchie's pub, the Punch Bowl. As we rounded the corner there appeared to be a congregation of some sort out the front. Drunken revellers? Paps? A combination of both? We hung back for a moment, played it cool, like a couple of leopards who'd spotted a pack of gazelle and were looking for some tasty young straglers who could mean easy pickings. Soon enough Miss S recognised a cohort, so we approached. After a brief chat we'd established that one of the Sugar Babes was inside, Amelle. I later learned she's currently number 1 on the charts which makes her more of a big deal than I thought she was last night. I played it cool, but the truth was I'd never heard of her. So, we'd established Amelle was inside, but who else could be there? There were a LOT of paps, maybe Guy Ritchie was in? Or Brad and Angelina? We soon decided someone would have to do some reconnoissance, and as I was unknown in paparazzi circles I was the perfect choice. Without hesitation I marched inside, pretending to talk to someone on my phone as a way of looking natural and playing it cool, I was half way into the room when it suddenly dawned on me that I had no idea what any celebs actually look like. You know, unless they're genuine A list, or were famous 10 years ago when I was more in tune with the latest flicks and the music scene. I returned a few minutes later reporting that I saw no one I knew, but that I didn't really know anyone so that didn't mean much. My rep was now on the line, I had to act quick so I calmly told them about my mobile phone ruse, how no one suspected a thing, how I was having pretend conversations and not just listening! At this point they told me the Punch Bowl is notorious for having no phone reception. I'm such a n00b - LOL.

All of a sudden there was commotion by the door, I stopped mid-sentence and ran full speed towards her, along with more paps than I'd seen in my life. Our cameras were prepared hours ago, manual focus, exposure and flash were set and locked in with duck tape, all for this very moment, there would be no mistakes. She had emerged. The next 60 seconds were unlike anything I'd experienced before, Amelle and some guy were walking reasonably quickly and we were all running backwards in front of them, all 15 of us, people were shouting warnings like "TREE" and "BIKE", it was pandemonium, flashes were firing constantly, Amelle was lapping it up but the guy looked pretty flustered.

I chekced the papers today to see if she made it in, low and behold both the free evenings had several shots of her (both with the times totally wrong, she left at 11pm, not 8 or 9).

I picked up loads more info throughout the night, but as dinner is served I'm going to publish this now and have a feed, if you've got any questions leave them in the comments and I'll get back to you, although I am off to Barbados on Thursday so you'll have to forgive me if I take a few days!

New babies, new computers, spider close ups and air guitars - just another London weekend

2009-08-10T21:26:00.012+01:00

Seven year old in the Apple store "But mummy, I've been asking for one since I was six"

Mum "Just because you've been asking for it doesn't mean you're entitled to it. I asked for a horse since I was six and didn't get one till I was 40"

Mother/son conversations like this are what I love about England, where else in the world does a mother tell her son he'll have to wait for an ipod because she had to wait for a horse? Tremendous. It was early Saturday morning (okay, well, late Saturday morning, maybe even early afternoon, but it felt early) and I was still buzzing from the UK Air Guitar Championships the night before (kudos Wild Thing 37, you rocked all our worlds), furthermore i was in the mood to buy something special. Something with the word "Pro" in the title. Some sort of laptop. Yes, this was the morning I would take the leap into the big bad world of Apple computing and invest in a super sexy MacBook Pro. 2 days in and it's rocking my world.

Sunday was a new adventure altogether, a story that would take me all the way to Richmond to shoot a baby and frolic with deer at the park. I met Ami almost 5 years ago in Egypt, a fellow Adelaidean also living in the UK, we'd not really kept in touch in the mean time so I was delighted to get an email from her a few months back asking if I'd take some photos of her baby (which wasn't born at that stage). Since Egypt she'd met and married Michael, a lovely English chap, and was still living in London. She's been receiving my increasingly irregular group emails (it's 2009 people, get on the blog train!) which is how she knew about my photography business and to top it all off her brother Nat who I also met in Egypt happened to be in town too so it was a reunion for the ages!

I present the beautiful baby Freya a few days shy of 4 weeks.

It would have been remiss of me not to have a picnic in the park seeing as I was all the way out at Richmond (a looong way from gritty Old Street when TfL aren't coming to the party with efficient public transport). I recruited the lovely Yvonne and the jumping Josh as my picnic companions, and with the weather being a perfect 25 degrees and clear the scene was set for a magic afternoon. We managed to find a gorgeous little area nestled among some trees and things to lay out our picnic and enjoy a mid afternoon nap, our dreams of being woken by deer nibbling at our toes were replaced with the reality of spiders and bugs crawling on us, but it was still an excellent afternoon thanks to some playful dogs and warm afternoon sun.

18 locks, 12 people, 2 boats and 1 Super Awesome™ weekend

2009-08-03T09:35:00.005+01:00

Super Awesome™ (adjective) The act of being better than super and better than awesome; the highest compliment one can pay to an event or person; popularised by Dave Gerhard. Eg - that canal boating weekend was super awesome.

And so it was, 12 of us had found our way to Rugby (the birthplace of rugby football for the record), some of us strangers, some friends, all with a common goal of taking Canal Boating to a new level. British weather being what it was meant we had a fair of rain, and the fact I was the only one on our boat with a rain jacket and it was raining during training I became the default pilot (or should that be captain?) for our boat, The Spirit Of Awesomeness (okay, so her real name was Harry but that didn't quite have the pizazz we were looking for).

After a relatively short session on how to operate and maintain the vessel they remarkably sent us on our way unaccompanied and let us fend for ourselves. Needless to say there was a bit of a learning curve.

From Canal Boating

It also didn't help that soon after setting off the rains came, and came, and came. We had to go through a series of three locks and it was absolutely pelting down, as the default captain I was left to stand outside in the middle of it all and get soaked to the core. To be fair, most of the others were running around opening and closing locks, but there were members of the team who considered such manual labour to be beneath them and remained inside sipping tea and reading about philosophy (I assume). But simonbills.com exists not to name and shame anyone, it's all about sharing the love, and over the course of the weekend there wasn't a single freeloader, everyone knew their role and played it well.

There are 3 ideal times to take good photos. Sun up, sun down, and right after a thunderstorm. The heavy rain soon gave way to clearer skies and we were blessed with the third type of ideal condition. As luck would have it the sun was reasonably low in the sky as well so there was this beautiful soft light, ideal for taking photos of people taking photos.

During our induction we asked whether we could climb on the roof of the boat and were told we could. After 3 days of not seeing a single other person on the roof of their boat I'm pretty sure they guy meant "You won't break the boat if you get on the roof, they're pretty sturdy" but what we heard was "You should totally spend loads of time on the roof, maybe even do some dancing up there as low bridges approach, and if you feel the need you can put an unstable chair up on that slippery roof and go your hardest."

Friday and Sunday were bad weather days, but Saturday was perfect. Glorious warm sunshine with brooding but non-threatening clouds to give it some atmosphere, the perfect opportunity to practice shooting into the sun and using lens flare to get cool effects. This is very much a hit and miss affair, but when it works I LOVE the results, this is probably my favourite shot of the weekend because it's a bit rough around the edges. It's not pin sharp from corner to corner, there's some motion blur on the hand, but the important bit, the eyes, are nice and sharp and are framed by a couple of the sun's rays (shot at a narrow aperture to get this star burst effect). It feels like the sun's coming down and wrapping itself Dave and his wine filled plastic cup (he lost glass privileges after 2 prior breakages).

Okay, so this blog is getting kind of long so I'll wrap it up with a final story. Our selected route took us through a tunnel, and not a short tunnel either, I think it was 1 mile or so in length which is pretty long for a narrow tunnel with no lights. We'd heard rumours it was haunted, so as a pre-emptive strike to scare off ghouls we put our ipod speakers on the roof and cranked Ghostbusters at full volume, you know, just to let them know we weren't to be taken lightly. This tunnel was DARK. There were no in-tunnel lights at all, so our only vision was via lighting from our boat. We had a big spot light on the front but in addition they recommend going down the boat, opening all the curtains and turning on all the lights to reflect light off the walls. Both these scenarios were customs made for taking cool photos, conditions were a little tricky and I had to shoot manual at f/2.8, but I love the results.

TO round things out I've put together a little slideshow, enjoy!

The World's Biggest Lens* and I

2009-07-19T17:07:00.006+01:00

When the opportunity arose to take Brendan's monster lens home over night I didn't have to be asked twice. The lens in question is the gargantuan Sigma 120-300 f/2.8L which I believe is the fastest zoom lens that extended to 300mm (for the fellow photography nerds out there!).

This is how is looked when attached to my Canon 5D2 (photo taken on iphone)

From Sigma Super Tele

To make it even more impressive I attached a 2x tele-converter which gave it an effective focal length of 240-600 with a fastest aperture of f/5.6. I attempted to attach a 1.4x extender as well but was devastated to discover this wasn't possible. Not to worry, as it was I had twice the length at my disposal than ever before, so with a certain amount of self consciousness I headed to the familiar surroundings of London's Southbank to try and see them in a different light, so to speak.

I've always loved a classic 3 card monty scam so I was thrilled to see one operating not 100m to the West of the Tate Modern. This was one of the poorer ones I'd encountered though as the dealer's mate posing as an unrelated bystander and winning money was so clearly the brother of the dealer it was almost comical. These two Bulgarians (I'm guessing) stood out like a couple of sore thumbs, and I'm pretty sure everyone else knew if too as they were still plying their trade in the same spot 30 minutes later, presumably still looking for their first mark. Anyway, I digress - as much as I wanted to take photos of the Bulgarians I used my better judgement and concluded it probably wasn't the best idea to photograph shady characters engaging in illicit activities with thousands of pounds of camera and lens around my neck (although I did have a brief fantasy about using my monopod as some sort of weapon if push came to shove.)

So, here's a list of things this lens is good for.

1) Shooting people on a bridge from down below
2) Shooting photos of people on a giant ferris wheel (take, the London Eye for instance) from down below
3) Shooting a bus going over a bridge from down below

Are you sensing a theme here?

I soon realised I'd have to provide a more diverse portfolio to keep the blog faithful happy so I decided to go for some people shots. It's the kind of lens that is perfect for getting candids of strangers, but you also run the risk of looking like a bit of a perv pointing it at groups of people. Fortunately I didn't care what people thought, I knew my heart was pure and my intentions were good, officer.

And to cap things off here's a few other randoms from the evening.

Which do you prefer of these last 2? I'm still undecided.

Tip Of The Week

Oooooohh yeah, that's right, the famous T.O.T.W is BACK! Although I'm thinking of renaming it to Tip Of The Arbitrary Period Of Time (T.O.T.A.P.O.T). So, I had a really great tip about memory card management all lined up, but have decided to wait until next week (or should I say next arbitrary period of time - which may actually be a week...) as I need to include a few photos of various things that I need to take and would involve me getting off the couch at this moment. So, the pretty lame tip this time round is to try shooting something you've never shot before, OR, try shooting something you've shot a lot of in a different way. I've taken literally thousands of shots of the Southbank over the years but with the help of some new equipment I was able to get some new angles and ideas. If you like shooting landscapes try taking the camera to the next sports game you go to, if you like shooting family events and flowers in your backyard try taking it to the streets for some gritty street photography, if you like using your 18-200 lens all the time try and get your hands on a 50mm prime and see how that floats your boat. If you've been shooting and editing a lot of weddings over the last month try and borrow the world's biggest lens* and take it round town for an afternoon.

*Okay, so it's not the world's biggest lens, but it's pretty big. This one would have to come close though.

It's like rain...... on your wedding day

2009-07-12T15:28:00.005+01:00

Alanis Morissette would have considered it ironic. It's not consistent with my understanding of irony, but I guess they do things a little differently in Canada, eh? For me the rain was just something that needed to be worked around, and fortunately right after the ceremony when it needed to be dry, it was.

The wedding of April and Fabian had a bit of an Ashes feel to it, but instead of war it was love. April hails from Brisbane, Fabian from London, they married over here but will shortly be moving downunder to the land of milk and honey to build a life together. Despite the weather the day was loads of fun, an intimate service was followed by a reception at Fabian's folks' place (thanks Ray and Tamison!) complete with a bouncy castle for the kids and a wedding singer for the adults!

My favourite part of the day was when the reception began, April was off with the wedding shoes and on with the thongs (or flip flops if you will), you can the girl out of Brisbane but you can't take Brisbane out of the girl! I love it.

Wedding Slideshow

2009-07-09T22:45:00.003+01:00

Recently picked up a new bit of software for online slideshows, quickly threw this one together from a wedding last month. I've spent the last few hours sorting it all out, uploading the files to my website via FTP and making sure the slideshow is linked properly (quite the achievement I thought!), as a result I've not only lost the will to blog, I've lost the will to live. Hope you enjoy the show, I know I'm going to enjoy BED, need to rest up before Saturday's wedding.

Vegetarian Shoes

2009-07-06T19:21:00.004+01:00

The keen observers among you will have noticed the change in the lay out of this blog. Kudos to you. For those who are less observant, or are first time visitors (welcome, by the way, take a look around, make yourself at home...) I can report that with the help of Nate Dogg (who's not actually a gangster rapper) I managed to widen the width of the main section - ok, so I didn't articulate that very well but I think you can figure out what I mean. The upshot is I can now put BIGGER PHOTOS on my blog which is awesome, 400 pixels do not do my expensive lenses and 21 megapixel sensor any justice whatsoever, here's hoping that 640 (or even 800 if I'm feeling adventurous) will!! There are far too many photographer's blogs with either no photos, or small photos, make them BIG people!

To celebrate I've thrown up a few shots from the weekend. I spent Saturday in Brighton catching up with old friends and new babies, the sun made a very welcome appearance too, I consider her to be an old friend I've not seen enough of in recent years.

From 2009-07-05 Brighton

So, what do you think of the new format? Thumbs up or down?

A tale of 2 weddings: Nisha and Carl

2009-06-21T17:26:00.009+01:00

With wine from France (red) and Argentina (white), an English band, Indian food and Australian photographers Nisha and Carl certainly know the meaning of multiculturalism. I was fortunate to spend Friday and Saturday taking a peek into their lives with my camera as my trusty companion as I covered their civil ceremony on the Friday and the Indian ceremony (and party!) on Saturday, and it's fair to say the days couldn't have been more different!

The civil ceremony was held at a registry office in a town hall with family and close friends in attendance. Carl wore a suit, Nisha a white dress, and the ceremony was finished in around 15 minutes before heading out the gardens on the ground for a few photos and some socialising. By contrast the Indian ceremony was a vastly more grandiose affair full of colour, fire, mandaps and bling (according to Nisha gangster rappers have nothing on her when it comes to bling - and I agree!). I tell you what, fire during a wedding ceremony is something Western weddings should really look into, there's something magical about the priest presiding over a fire and it opens up a world of photographic opportunities! Having never covered a Hindu wedding before (my previous Asian wedding was Muslim Bengali) I wasn't sure what to expect, or how long the ceremony went for, turns out it was close to 8 times longer than the civil ceremony at around 2 hours so my frenetic photography at the start slowed down to a more leisurely pace by the end!

One of the things I love about shooting weddings, especially here in the UK, is experiencing new things and tasting different flavours of life. I got to see the chaos of an Indian bride's house on the day of her wedding, meet the warm and generous family and friends of the couple and sample some delicacies that put Brick Lane to shame (including the hottest chicken tikka ever!).

Huge thanks go to the very talented Shane Lee who was second shooting with me while Danny lived it up in Italy and especially Nisha and Carl for being a great couple and running a tight ship which made my job much easier. Oh yeah, and thanks for dinner, a taste sensation.

Wedding: Anna and Ant (and an owl)

2009-06-14T18:21:00.001+01:00

Anyone who's ever been to my folks' house will know that my mum collects owls. There's hundreds of them filing up several shelves in the living room, ceramic owls, wooden owls, an owl my brother made in pottery class in primary school (which doesn't really look exactly like an owl, but it's beautiful nonetheless) and even a stuffed owl perched upon a branch attached to the wall. Little did I know that they would cross my path again, years later, as a wedding photographer in London.

Yesterday Danny and I had the privilege of shooting the wedding of Anna and Antranik at the salubrious Montague on the Gardens hotel at Russell Square, London - a gorgeous venue with super helpful staff. The day was amazing, the weather perfect, venue ideal, speeches hilarious and bride glamorous, but the story of the day is the owls.

Anna loves owls, and Ant had tried fruitlessly to arrange for an owl to be there on their wedding day. Apparently there are trained owls which the ring bearer gives the ring to at the back of the room which actually fly to the alter to present the ring to the groom, how cool is that? Ant was unable to book this owl, and was unsuccessful at recruiting another owl after contacting various owl enthusiasts. Imagine his surprise then, when he walked through Russell Square on the morning of the wedding to discover some sort of owl awareness exhibition featuring, you guessed it, a whole bunch of owls!! Russell Square was less than 100m from the venue, and we'd planned to go there for photos anyway, this little touch of owl related magic was the absolute icing on the wedding cake (not literally).

Here are some of my favourite shots from the day, I've not been through everything thoroughly yet, and I know Danny's taken a bunch of amazing shots which I've not seen yet, but this is a bit of a taster. Can't wait to put the album together!

Big thanks go to Ant and especially Anna who was willing to stand in a fountain and run through flocks of pigeons in the name of getting great photos!!

Adelaide, Picasa and expensive photographers

2009-06-10T22:05:00.000+01:00

Right, it's a bit of an eclectic mix of ideas in this instalment, but they all link together so bear with me.

Ok, where to begin? I guess this story starts several months ago when I attended a photography expo down in Hammersmith. One of the speakers was a chap by the name of Gary Fong, he's basically made a fortune as a photography entrepreneur, he was a very engaging speaker, had loads of great ideas, but if you wanted to hear more you had to fork out for his DVD (or buy one of his light spheres to get perfect lighting guaranteed in every situation - supposedly).

Fast track to today. On Saturday I'm shooting my first wedding of the season, really really excited about it, I've got my 5D2 waiting and ready to be unleashed and I just can't wait. I decided to get some inspiration by taking a look at what various photographers on the interweb are producing, so I decided to check out the aforementioned Gary Fong. I don't think he actually shoots many (any?) weddings any more, but I found this page which detailed his price list as at 2005. You have to admire a man who charges $120,000 for a day's shoot and passes it off as a discount on his usual rates!

I decided to check out his up to date blog, it seems that these days he just likes taking photos on his iphone. Fair play, it is a lovely gadget. One thing I found on his blog was an embedded slideshow, I did a bit of digging and discovered it was linked to Google's excellent Picasa photo editing / on-line display software. Brilliant, I've got most of my photos on Picasa already so with no additional work on my behalf I can now create on line web albums like the one below - a few shots I took when I was back home in Adelaide recently.

Next blog entry will have some wedding pics, the venue is stunning so stay tuned for some cool shots.

A new toy

2009-06-07T21:40:00.000+01:00

What a week! I was woken this morning by a flash of light outside my window, several seconds later the unfamiliar sound of thunder followed, first time I've encountered lightning in London. I miss thunder and lightning, it puts things into perspective. But this was only 1 of many exciting things to happen this week.

You may have noticed a link to the right of screen for Simon Bills Photography on Facebook, yes, that's right, in an act of unrivalled self indulgence I have set up page whereby people can officially become "fans". Of course that's not how I see it, I just see it as a group of people who like photography, but I'm curious to see if any leads come from this foray into social network marketing.

As exciting as these things are there was something EVEN MORE EXCITING that happened this week (no, I'm not talking about the Netherlands beating England in the T20 world cup, or about Feds winning his long awaited French Open), my new Canon 5D Mk II arrived!! Woo hoo.

You know, until you've experienced 21 megapixels of camera it's really hard to feel like your life is in any way complete, I used to be happy with a mere 10 but now I realise how lacking my life was. I'm kidding of course, before Canon released the 5D mk II I was hoping for 15mp, but it seems like Canon have gone all out on the megapixel war while Nikon are taking a more sensible approach to camera development, either way it's unlikely I'll be shooting at full res very often for the time being as my trusty little laptop struggles a bit to handle 27mb RAW files! However, I have taken a few shots at full res and the results are absolutely stunning, the following 3 shots are various crops of the first image, I've reduced them in size and quality for the net so the original image is sharper than this appears, but you get the idea of the copping possibilities. This is also hand held (1/250) so sharpness would be improved had I used a tripod.

I've yet to properly put her through her paces, besides a quick walk to the supermarket to grab some delicious ingredients for a tasty lunch. There were a couple of interesting old cars along the way (check the licence plates on the Torino!) and some pigeons, but I'm looking forward to having a proper session, and I'm now even more exciting for the wedding I'm shooting on Saturday.

One of the reasons I wanted this camera, besides the full frame sensor and the benefits that brings, was the high ISO performance. ISO is basically how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light, the higher the number the more sensitive and the better it is for light light shooting (dark churches etc). The next 3 images are more for the camera heads out there but I've tested at ISO 1600, 6400 and 25600 by shooting in jpeg and applying no PP work in Lightroom.

ISO 1600

ISO 6400

ISO 25600

These are hardly scientific tests, no tripod and the subject isn't the best, but you get the idea that you can get great results at 1600, decent results at 6400 and at a stretch you could probably use 25600 but I wouldn't recommend it.

One of these days I'll take advantage of the full HD video this puppy offers and put a video together, but don't hold your breath, I need to get some video editing software and learn how to use it first and at the moment I've got bigger fish to fry.

Are you the paparazzi?

2009-05-31T18:55:00.000+01:00

Has the world turned upside down? If Nadal being bundled out of the French in the 4th round to a Swede, a Swede(!), wasn't weird enough London has just reeled off her second successive sunny weekend. Insanity. I decided to head out to Hampstead Heath for a picnic with Bec and Danny, but our plans were scuppered when we learned the train we'd planned on taking wasn't running. Time for plan B, which just so happened to be Highbury Fields just over the road from the redundant train station we were standing at.

I was armed with my full photographic arsenal, including my recently acquired 5-in-1 reflector which I was very keen to practise using. Contrary to popular belief bright sunny days don't make for good photos, especially when your subject is people, the harsh light has a tendency to wash out light skinned faces, make people squint, turn people into silhouettes (if you don't know what you're doing behind the lens) or even worse, cast horrendous shadows all over faces. Long story short it's a nightmare. Unless you possess, and know how to use a reflector that is. I was half way there in that I possessed a reflector, the tricky part is figuring out what to do with it.

Fortunately the aforementioned Danny is my Old Street Photography running mate, and his wife Bec was a willing model, so between us we managed put our heads together and figure this thing out.

From Highbury Fields Forever

We soon discovered where the idea of eating a strawberry had come from, that unscrupulous photo editor from the Times magazine had pulled a sneaky Derren Brown style subconscious suggestion on us with the cover of the magazine Bec was reading...

The cutest moment of the day came when I was shooting this shot of Bec and Danny

These two little girls, maybe 8 or 10 years old, came up to me and said "Excuse me, are you the paparazzi?" I assured them I was not, and that there were my friends I was taking photos of. Kids are priceless.

Managed to catch another classic London shot today, this one will go alongside my shots of Big Ben, the Millenium Bridge, and London Eye in the snow - a man putting his shorts back on after sunbathing in his briefs.

Last but not least we have my favourite "non-reflector" shot of the day.

A good day was had by all, apart from the 2 children Danny and I both hit with frisbees in separate disc related incidents, but as they say, no blood no foul, and I'm sure those kids will grow up giving frisbees the respect they deserve.

Tip Of The Week: Buy a reflector and practice with it, find some good online tutorials to learn the basics and experiment with the results of using different coloured reflectors. Get one you can fit into your kit bag, mine goes in the laptop compartment of my bag and weighs next to nothing.

A good day

2009-05-26T21:19:00.000+01:00

It's been a good day. I've just secured another wedding booking, 4 weddings in 5 weeks in June / July will keep me busy, I've passed my life in the UK test - the first step to British citizenship, I'm enjoying a tasty Jacob's Creek Shiraz and the Flight of the Conchords is on in 68 minutes. Life doesn't get much better than this.

Except for life in Australia, where I spent a hectic, whirlwind fortnight last month. Most of the time was in and around my home town of Adelaide, although I spent a great 2 days in Sydney. I was lucky to be staying close to the Opera House, and even luckier to get a nice sunset on the evening I went to take photos. The eternal struggle as a photographer who loves travelling - to take photos as the sun goes down, or enjoy a few sundowners with good friends and just enjoy the moment? If someone invented a time machine that only sent you back 30 minutes I would be all over that.

The lovely Yvonne

From Australia - Sydney

Bondi Barrels

Opera House Sunset 1

Opera House Sunset 2

Opera House Sunset 3

Sydney Sunset

Manly Moment

Tip of the week
Oh yeah, that's right, the tip of the week is back. Big time. The tip this week is "Take note of Simon's tips of the week". I refer to my TOTW from several months back referring to setting your camera to a narrow aperture when shooting a bright light to create a star effect, my Opera House shots were all shot at f/22 which caused that cool star effect with the sun shining through, had I shot that at f/2.8 it would have looked average instead of awesome. Okay, so it was pretty lame rehashing at old TOTW, promise I'll come up something new next time if I get even 1 comment for this post!

Friday Night Project

2009-05-23T11:58:00.000+01:00

After devouring an entire box of savoury shapes for dinner, a rare treat in London, I was left wonder how best to spend the rest of my Friday night. I was beginning to tire of *cough* 27 Dresses, I mean, as far as predictable rom coms go this was arguably the most predictable (but such is my dedication to the cause of wedding photography I'm prepared to go extraordinary lengths to understand what makes a bride tick!).

So, what to do? I couldn't help but notice the lovely late evening light streaming in through my large lounge room windows, so I made the decision to start a photographic assignment that's been on my to do list for a little while. But I had to work fast. The assignment involved setting the camera up on a tripod and shooting myself in various different poses then putting them together in Photoshop to make it look like I was everywhere at once. The problem with starting this this at 7:30pm was that during 20 frantic minutes of shooting (with no less than 6 changes of clothes) the amount of light had changed significantly which threw things out of whack.

I was very careful about setting things up and positioning myself for the photos. The way I put it together was to use the first photo I took (me on the drums) as the background then add the other shots as layers on top using only a cut out of myself and not the whole scene. To ensure a consistent look I set the camera to manual (f/4.0, 1/30th, ISO 400) and also used manual focus. With the same light the layering wouldn't have been a problem , but as the light had changed I attempted to adjust each photo in Lightroom to have the same exposure before exporting to Photoshop and putting it altogether, although this didn't really work that well. As a result I had to spend a lot of time on each photo cutting out the precise shape for each layer, if the light was the same for all images it wouldn't have needed to be so precise as the background (wall colour for instance) would have been identical and you wouldn't have been able to tell the layer from the background.

After this was all put together I imported the file back into Lightroom and applied a Surreal Edgy preset which I think suited the style of the image. So, without further adu I present the one man rock band.

As a side note I took another photo which I didn't use with me as a groupy sitting back to camera at the front of the scene. I decided not to use it as the 10mm lens distorts perspective in such a way that I took up too much of the frame. Sometimes less more.

Engagement Shoot - Chona and Richard

2009-05-10T16:28:00.000+01:00

I met Chona and Rich at a house party of a mutual friend Jenny. They'd recently become engaged and were on the look out for a wedding photographer, and as luck would have it they'd already seen some photos from Wimbledon I'd put on Facebook after Jenny had left a comment. I was introduced to them as the guy who took those Wimbledon photos and they soon asked whether I shot weddings too. A beer or two later I'd passed on my business card and we'd arranged to set up a more formal meeting shortly, after all, being able to take good photos from the second row of the greatest tennis match of all time isn't hard to do and doesn't necessarily mean you can shoot a wedding.

Several months later arrangements were in place and the time had come for the engagement shoot. I like to do an engagement shoot before the wedding for a couple of reasons, firstly the couple gets some great casual photos to keep for life or use on their wedding invitations, but secondly, and more importantly it gets them used to having their photo taken and is a great chance to build rapport between the photographer and the couple.

The shoot was loads of fun and we were fortunate to get great lighting conditions, overcast but bright. Big thanks go to Josh for assisting with the shoot. Here's some of my favourites plus a slideshow of the day.

Easter Well Spent

2009-04-14T21:09:00.000+01:00

IN just 15 hours I'll be climbing aboard a giant cigar and flying to the other side of the world. Unlike most people I like nothing more than a good long haul flight, 24 hours of sitting in a comfy seat with a host of entertainment options available and someone who brings you food and drink and when you press a button - I don't see what the problem is? It's also a good time of forced relaxation, where you have no option but to sit there and take stock of life.

However, the forced relaxation this time round will have somewhat less impact than usual due to the fact that the 4 day Easter break was spent doing exactly that - relaxing. Besides a brief trip to the supermarket on Good Friday I didn't leave the flat until I left for work this Tuesday morning. I know what you're thinking, didn't you go crazy? How did you pass the time? This is how.

Oh, and here's an excerpt from my e-ticket for my return flight from London to Sydney

YOUR AIRLINE RECEIPT:
FARE: GBP 15.00
CHARGES/TAXES: GBP 364.20
TOTAL : GBP 379.20

Happy Birthday Simon

2009-04-10T20:51:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time birthdays were filled with wonderment, sleepless nights in the lead up, cakes shaped like cats and cricket pitches (pretty sure Mum baked both of these in my younger years - is that right Mum?), fairly bread, parties and PRESENTS. Presents from parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, brothers, friends, you name it.

When you turn 31 and have your first trip home in 14 months less than a week after your birthday it's easy to all but forget you're another year older, what with all the excitement of a 24 hour long haul flight on the horizon. And so it was that when I finally got around to organising a party on the night of my birthday at Bloomsbury Bowl I was far too late to actually book a bowling lane or a karaoke booth. Not to worry, the night turned out to be loads of fun, some good friends, some eats in the 50's style diner, some excellent drinks and some very average games of pool (miraculously I managed to have a 6-1 win loss record despite my best attempts of sabotaging my team mate.) One of the highlights of the night was receiving my first (and only) present, an awesome paint by numbers set of a knight riding a horse from Pam and Jay (thanks guys), it looks pretty hard but apparently is suitable for ages 8+ so I'll see what I can do, looking forward to nailing it over the Easter long weekend.

In order to keep this post vaguely photo related (although maybe this blog needs to transcend the photo pigeon hole it's currently in?) I thought I'd put together a birthday wishlist in case anyone out there has deep pockets and is feeling particularly generous:

Canon 5d II - I think 21mp is a bit of overkill but the full frame sensor would be real nice.

Canon EF 16-35mm f2.8 L MKII USM Lens - A perfect compliment to the 5D II, this puppy would be amazing for shooting a wedding.

Canon EF 85mm f1.2 L II USM Lens - The results I get on my cheap prime lens are lovely, I can only imagine the sort of image quality and low light capabilities this thing would bring to the table.

Pocket Wizard and a few more flashguns - After last weeks lighting course I'm keen to try a ton of new effects, the Pocket Wizard attaches to your camera and transmits a signal to a bunch of remote flash guns. Would be a plenty to learn but it would be awesome. For the record anyone interested in off camera flash lighting should head over to Strobist to get some inspiration and tips, some incredible stuff there.

I think these things would make me happy. Well, until something newer and better and faster and shinyer comes along. Truth be told though I'm pretty chuffed with all the kit I've already got, and at the end of the day the person behind the lens is a lot more important than what they're using.

Here's hoping the next 12 months are as good as the last.

Studio Session

2009-04-05T12:47:00.000+01:00

I've been in this photography game for a while now, but up to this point all my work has been shot using available light or on camera flash (with a few brief experiments with taking my flashgun off camera with a 2 foot extension cord.) So it was with great excitement that I ran to catch a bus bright and early yesterday morning to take me to a course on studio lighting and photography.

The course was held by Studio Time and was a great introduction to the ins and outs of setting up your lighting using studio lights, using light meters properly, lighting your subject and your background, high key lighting, low key lighting, the use of gels and a bunch of other useful stuff. I went on the course with my mate Danny and there was just 1 other participant so it was the perfect number, it was very hands on and they had a model in and everything.

Within a few minutes of setting up the lighting I was getting shots like this and thinking that shooting in a studio is too easy.

From Studio Session

We learnt about how light behaves in the studio, how to reflect it with different reflectors and how to absorb it with blacks. From this next shot you'll see how the white foam was used to bounce the light back on the model from the softbox that was pointing down on her. Obviously the actual shot wouldn't reveal the manky looking foam.

The model Jane was incredibly photogenic, if anything this course confirmed my suspicions that it's easy to get stunning results once you have your technical wings and can get the model to pose. The world's top studio photogs have got it even easier, they've have their help spend a few hours setting up all the lights so by they time they arrive everything is good to go, next thing a stunning model who knows how to pose enters the scene, they snap a few shots and send the memory card off to someone else to post process. Too easy.

We learnt high key (whites background, overexposed image with high contrast to bring out the featres)

Low key (dark, moody film noir style shots with just the one directional gridded spot light to light the face against a black background)

Terror photos- Danny was adjusting the light in the background and fired a shot off to see how it would look, when he looked like a menacing silhouette I insisted that he do a threatening pose, the hilarious result can be seen below. We tried a few more time to recreate the shot but with the look of terror on the model's face, unfortunately she couldn't stop giggling and the subsequent photos weren't as good as the first.

And regular looking people photos, like Danny who was a natural in front of the camera with his clearly rehearsed Harris Scarfe catalogue poses.

We even managed to get a semi decent shot of one of the less photogenic people going round, even if it is a bit cheesy.

All round a great experience, I was like a sponge taking it all in as it was all so new. I know enough now to book a few hours in a studio and have a play around, if I ever get round to this rest assured you can see the results here at www.simonbills.com.

Off to do a baby shoot this afternoon which should be great, until next time.

End of an era

2009-03-31T22:01:00.000+01:00

On Saturday I headed out with my friends Shane and Siobhan for what is to be our last Shoot Experience experience. Regulars to this blog may recall several previous posts that involved much gloating and photos of winners badges, this time round you will find neither of those things, just a giant bunch of sour grapes and a realisation that things move on.

A brief background to bring up to speed:
- September 2007 I enter my first Shoot event with 3 friends forming a team of 4. 3 other friends also entered the event as their own team. We won a winners badge for one of the clues and were stoked to bits, never been prouder and pumped for the next event. This was the winning shot for the clue Emerald City

- A month or 2 later both teams enter a follow up event Shoot Brixton. Still chuffed from our victory we decided to raise the audacity stakes and named our team "Reigning Clue I Champions". Our rival team also decided to change their name, or shall I say declare war, when they registered as "Better than Simon's team". Clearly a preposterous statement, what with us already having a winners badge and all, but they ran with it. This was a successful event for both teams with winners badges all round (to put it in perceptive there are roughly 60 teams with 13 winners badges on offer). My then flatmate Dave took one for the team for this winning shot.

From Shoot Brixton

- The next 2 events saw us win another 2 badges, the good times continued to roll. The only downside was the success of our arch rivals which burned me on the inside - although I'll never admit it, especially on the internet. They managed to win themselves free cameras after Shane submerged himself in a polluted London canal for a photo.

- A couple more events passed, and for various reasons we didn't pick up any silverware (a technical mishap saw our photos omitted from the judging process in one event, and we just didn't win anything in the next despite having some AWESOME photos!). There was disharmony in the team, people has grown apart, one team member was leaving the country, we all shook hands and went our separate ways.

- The way it panned out our team broke up at the same time as Better Than Simon's Team, a few negations took place and the next thing I knew we had formed a super group in the ashes of breakups. The new team was called Simon Has Defected (not Simon Has Defecated as one of the judges thought) and we tasted immediate success with this shot for the clue "No need to cross the Atlantic for a flying fish or loaf shaped fruit"

This brings you up to last Saturday. I headed out for my 8th (yes, 8th!!) event and I have to say, all good things must come to an end. The giddy excitement of running round new, unseen corners of London, exploring the area, taking cool photos and fiercely competing against a rival team had been replaced by walking round familiar corners of London with a weight of expectation round my neck, no banter with a rival outfit and no buzz about the day. Don't get me wrong, I would heartily recommend the event to anyone looking for a novel way to spend an afternoon, but after 8 events and 18 months I feel that I, and my photography, has moved on. I'm all about taking classic, timeless images now, not the cheesy shots that tend to win prizes in these events (bitter much at not winning anything on Saturday?).

This is my favourite shot from the shoot just been for 2 reasons - firstly I like the shot itself, the framing, the light, the colours, but secondly becuase it has an awesome story behind it. The clue was "The unofficial start of carnival, a Horni man provided the land, some other Charlie made it a Pleasance experience" so we decided we needed some devils horns to represent a Horni man. Next we had to represent Charlie, and while no one in our team has even seen cocaine, let alone sampled it, we are street wise enough to know that it's known as Charlie in various circles, so we used some sugar at a cafe to represent this in the photo. The final step was the word Pleasance, we decided this had to be spoken by the devil in a speech bubble.

Sooooo, we were sitting at the cafe debating who would write the sign, all 3 of us had terrible hand writing, when all of a sudden the guy sitting at the table next to
us offers to do it for us on account of his excellent penmanship. We got talking to him (as we put him to work on the sign), he was from Sydney and was over here for a fashion show. Another thing about him was that he happened to look a lot like the devil. Perfect for our photo. After a little bit of arm twisting he agreed to pose for us, the result was great so we offered to email it to him. After googling his name later that night (as you do) we discovered he's actually a famous Australian fashion guru, he's been on Australia's Next Top Model as an industry expert and there's loads of stuff about him all over the net.

And we made him dress like the devil and endorse the use of class A drugs.

This is why I still love these Shoot Experience events, even if some of the magic has worn off.

From Shoot Portabello

Tripod Nazis and the last of the winter light

2009-03-25T21:26:00.001Z

With daylight savings just 4 short days away this is the last week for any Londoners wanting to leave work at 5:30, grab their tripods and walk straight out into the glorious light of the magic hour (with plenty of time to find your spot and get everything ready). As of next week the ideal time to get night shots will be pretty close to 7:30 - 8:30, so unless you're a late working city worker or work a long way from the photographic side of London (like Slough for instance - Shane, I'm talking about you!) it's not that convenient for a quick post work session. Of course in a few months time the magic hour will be starting at 9pm so there's plenty of time for a feed with friends and a few brews before heading out - but who feels like lugging round heavy camera gear and a tripod with a belly full of curry and beer?

With this in mind I've made the time to get out there twice in the past week after work with a message to London - lift up your skirt and show me what you've got! Last week I headed out with some crew from work and managed to get some nice shots of the Tate and Millenium Bridge, I might talk about this night in future blog, but today's blog is all about last night.

It's literally been a couple of years since I headed down to Tower Bridge with the trusty SLR so I was excited at the prospect of hitting it with better equipment and, more importantly, a better trained eye. I had a shot in mind that I really wanted to get but as the evening progressed I just couldn't quite get the framing of that particular shot, and with so many other great angles I moved on and went with some different ideas.

From Tower Bridge Tuesday

As expected I encountered some problems from the tripod Nazis. As anyone who's ever wanted to take photos with a tripod in London has probably found out security guards are not your friends. Part of their remit is to make life for us photographers as difficult as possible, in recent times I've had various guards give me the following reasons for why I can't take photos with a tripod:
1) Security - I could be a terrorist planning an attack
2) Health and safety, someone could trip over my tripod
3) I must be a professional and by me taking a photo of their landmark (let's say the London Eye, or Tower Bridge last night) I am somehow robbing them of their financial dues. This one is particularly preposterous.
4) There are children around (because photos of kids in full winter gear ice skating is really what the perverts are after these days)

Last night I managed to Derren Brown this guy into submission though. WHen he came over I was all friendly, he told me I was zooming in a bit too much on a particular building so I showed him the photos I was taking with my ultra wide 10-20 lens, then he asked what I was using the photos for so I told him personal use then he said I was going to have to stop so I got a little testy and told him it was ridiculous as both reasons he had weren't valid in my case. I did the good cop bad cop routine all by myself and it seemed to work as he eventually walked off while I continued shooting. This was the shot I was taking, and the shot that I'd come there to take, so I didn't want to be rushed.

All in all a good night. I rounded it out with an attempted bus shot, but by this stage the sky was pitch black and it didn't make a nice backdrop, but I guess it turned out alright in the end with the conversion to black and white.

Until next time, get out there and make the most of this light!

Franklyn follow-up and Covent Garden compact

2009-03-22T11:06:00.000Z

I'll start by saying I've spent more time in London's west end than usual this weekend. On Friday night I headed in to see the movie Franklyn which I spoke about in my last blog, you remember, the one that was filmed on my street? It's fair to say it was an unusual movie, I respected the fact it was something new and original (unlike the 4 previews which were all for sequels), what I didn't respect as much was the fact the movie made no sense and 2 days later I'm still left wondering who or what Franklyn was. I guess that's why it was showing in only 1 London cinema 3 weeks after release, a cinema consisting of just 4 rows!! I did a quick headcount, there were 24 others in there with me. Still though, it was awesome seeing my street on the big screen, it played a pretty major part too which was great.

My second West End experience came about yesterday when I headed to Covent Garden to check out the London Transport Museum. I guess it was an okay museum, as far as museums go, but I've concluded I'm more interested in the future than the past and the whole experience, while slightly interesting, didn't really float my boat (not unlike the Princess Alice in 1865 - look at that, I did learn something). While my friends Bec and Danny were still looking round the museum I took the opportunity to put a recently acquired inexpensive Panasonic FS3 point and shoot through it's paces. I find that I almost never use a point and shoot now that I've got my big cameras, but there's something to be said about using something no bigger than a deck of cards to create images, and from the 15 minutes I had to take some shots you can see that it is possible to get nice images with basic equipment if you know how to compose a shot and understand light.

From Covent Garden Compact

(the guy with the umbrella is actually standing on someone's head in this shot, it wasn't possible to get the whole scene though as the people on the balcony have direct sun on them while the foreground is all in shade, and the dynamic range on a little P & S couldn't handle the contrast)

A different type of camera

2009-03-14T14:23:00.000Z

Roughly 18 months ago I received an exciting letter in the post. It told me that in a few weeks time some Hollywood film makers were coming to town and using my street (yes, MY STREET!!) to film part of their new movie. The filming was taking place maybe 100 metres from my front door, so needless to say I decided to head on down and see how these Hollywood big boys do it (and also with Casino Royale Bond girl Eva Green starring I thought I might chance my arm with her if the opportunity arose).

From Filming on My Street

The movie being made went by the name of Franklyn, some sort of sci-fi drama set in a futuristic London with explosions and stuff in it. From a photographic standpoint the importance placed on lighting was quite extraordinary. Like still photography it's all about quality, not quantity, and from the next couple of shots you'll see that every light used was either bounced or put through some pretty high strength diffusers which cause a nice soft light - direct light causes more contrast in the image / scene and often results in ugly harsh shadows.

Without doubt the most impressive bit of kit had nothing to with photography though, it was an incredible rain making machine. It was a basically a 15m pipe held up by a crane and attached to a high power hose, the pipe had a series of sprinkler devices right down the length of it, and when the juice was turned on the result was a monsoon.

Now I know what you're thinking - this is all well and good Simon but you're really clutching at straws talking about photos taken 18 months ago, why now? I'll tell you why, because a few weeks ago I was walking through the Underground when I saw a poster for the movie on a wall announcing its cinema release! Hooray! Post production was a little longer than I'd anticipated but that's fine, the day had finally arrived I could go to my local cinema and see my own freakin' street on the silver screen!

Well, at least that's what I thought.

I had planned to see it this Sunday but when I looked where it was showing there was ONE CINEMA IN THE WHOLE OF LONDON I could see it at! 2 weeks after release! For a film set in London with several moderately big name stars (Ryan Philipe is the other one)! What's going on? The cost of 5 minutes screen time in Tabernacle St must have been astronomical, there were 3 cranes (2 for lighting, 1 for the rain machine), the rain machine itself, a crew of close to 50, countless lights and other movie related stuff, catering for the cast and crew, the time and cost of writing to all the local residents giving them the heads up, money paid to The Tabernacle pub where filming took place, replacing the window where the explosion scene took place (I wasn't there for this but it sounded awesome) and paying off the council to block off the road for 2 weeks. And all for a movie that hardly saw the light of day in London cinemas.

I'm interested to hear if anyone out there in the rest of the world has heard of this movie? Let me know in the comments.

In other news I'm going on a shoot Monday night so I'll get something new up here soon rather than resorting to using old stuff.

My second compact

2009-03-08T15:22:00.000Z

Way back in April last year, in the early days of simonbills.com, I decided to post an entry detailing how I got into photography and some of my early photos, check it out here if you like.

At the end of that post I promised "for the next instalment of my photographic odyssey you'll see what results a hefty 4mp Canon point and shoot can deliver" - this was because my first camera, a 3mp Pentax, was stolen by Argentinian banditos 6 months after purchase. So here it is, my favourite shots on my favourite ever point and shoot camera (I've had 4 now), the mighty Canon Powershot S400.

Like all good stories this one is a mixture of tragedy and comedy. The story starts in Miami with the purchase of the camera on what turned out to be quite a traumatic day (mainly due to a run in with a local shop keep which resulted in him labelling me a "f*cking c*cksucker" as I walked out of his shop). The story ends in tragedy with many of the photos taken on this little gem being lost for good in the great hard drive crash of 2007. I'm sure I have many of the photos backed up on CDs on the other side of the world, but that's not useful for updating a blog on a sunny Sunday afternoon in London. Fortunately I was able to dig up my photos from 2 weeks in the USA which I'll share with you now.

This first shot was of Miami beach and was one of the first shots I took my with my new baby. The default colours on this camera were more saturated than on my previous machine, and the screen was nicer too so I was thrilled to see the vibrant blues on this shot.

About a week later I'd moved on from Miami to Vegas, met some strangers at a hostel and embarked on a 4 day road trip with them to see Hoover Dam, the Grand Canyon, some National Monuments in Utah and Zion National Park. The initial plan was for just an overnight trip, so we left all our clothes and bags in Vegas, but adventure got on the way so we ran with it.

This is probably my favourite photo taken by my little 4mp Canon, and disappointingly it wasn't even me that took it. This shots sums up what travel is all about for me, the open road, vast space, blue skies, bare feet and no particular agenda. It also highlights the beauty of photography, the fact that my favourite shot was taken by someone sticking their hand out the window of a moving van and snapping randomly - what other art form can you create something so beautiful completely by accident?

No chit chat for this one, just a photo I like.

And finally a shot from Zion National Park. I remember at the time walking along and spotting the bridge in the distance, I figured the shot really needed people crossing the bridge to make it interesting so I hung back and waited for my crew to make the crossing.

It's interesting that 5 1/2 years ago, before I even knew I really liked taking photos, that I was creating scenes and making photos rather than just taking them. Looking back over these old shots there's certainly a fair few duds, and shots I would take totally differently now, but there are still a few gems in there where I did all the right things even if I didn't know I was doing them.

Leaders and Followers (and a new website)

2009-02-15T19:28:00.000Z

Once again I'm pushing the boundaries of what the blogging / photography art form can withstand by doing another entry without any photos.

I'm here today to introduce you to a couple of new things. Firstly I've added a widget to the blog (top right) which lists those of you who "follow" my blog. If you want to join the illustrious crew of 4 then simply click the "follow this blog" link and you'll be added. To be honest I don't really know what it actually does, I'm thinking that maybe it adds a RSS feed to your bookmarks or something but I can't be sure. The only way to find it is for you to click it and see. Go on, you know you want to.

Another exciting new development (it's actually far more exciting than the addition of the followers widget) is that my Old Street Photography website is finally operational! It's been a looooooooooooooong time coming but I'm really pleased with how it's turned out. Feel free to check it out, I'd love to hear some feedback too, especially anything that doesn't work or you find annoying. Feel free to try and find it in a google search too, it's all good to get my google ranking up!

Check it out at www.oldstreetphotography.com

Promise I'll have some photos for you next time.

Cold Street Photography

2009-02-02T20:25:00.000Z

If you live in the UK, or have friends who live in the UK, or if you read the Sydney Morning Herald who seem to have an unnatural obsession with the motherland you'll know that we're having some pretty serious snow at the moment. In the spirit of striking while the iron is hot (or when the snow is cold as the case my be) I thought I'd do this blog entry about my shots today.

When I went to bed last night it was coming down pretty hard and was already settling on the road so I assumed London would be well and truly blanked come morning, and I was right. I set my alarm early with a view to setting out early and capturing some images en route to the office, and after being woken at 6:45 by a text message from a colleague telling me she wouldn't be in I was awake and ready for action.

I wanted to start my photos at Westminster, home of Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliment, however London Underground weren't coming the party and when I made it to London Bridge tube this is what was waiting for me on the connection to Westminster.

From London Snow 09

Now obviously I wasn't prepared to wait 17 minutes for a train that may or may not arrive, so I bravely ventured out and decided to make my way on foot to the big clock along the south bank of the River Thames.

And then I finally made it to promise land.

I got the camera out again on the way home, this time I ventured on foot to the Bank station and tubed it home from there, I was keen to shoot St Pauls in her snowy state before it all melted. I discovered a 10 foot snowman which must have been constructed by engineering students with the day off.

And then the best thing I saw all day. The spirit in the whole city was festive from the minute I woke up, adults in suits were having snowball fights, kids from the housing estate next to work were throwing snowballs from their balconies at unsuspecting passers by, thousands of snowmen of various sizes were being erected anywhere you could imagine, it was great. However, as I crossed the Millennium footbridge there was a barge passing underneath with half a dozen crew on the back, all of a sudden a few people on the bride made snowballs and started pegging them, then the crew started making their own and retaliating, I got into the act myself and Londoners were united. Then this HUGE barge decided he wanted some more so he turned around and headed back for round 2. As it approached there was palpable excitement on the bridge, punters were feverishly preparing their weapons of combat, stockpiling supplies and forming allies, while our rivals below were also forming strategies.

Good times indeed.

Tip of the week:

Yeah, that's right, another tip - and you thought last time was a once off? When shooting snow your camera's metering system will usually get tricked into thinking the bright white shouldn't actually be that bright and it underexposes the image, it's a good idea to overexpose your images by a stop or so prevent the snow from being a dull grey colour rather than pure white. Or you could just shoot RAW and fix it in 2 seconds later. The choice is yours.

Sleeping with the enemy

2009-01-21T21:53:00.000Z

In the world before cheap SLR cameras primal chaos reigned, Canon sought order but the Nikon can fly only when its feathers are grown. The two worlds formed again and yet again, as endless aeons wheeled and passed. The moistures of the Earth, all the powers of the Sun and Moon, all worked upon a certain sensor - old as creation, and it became magically sensitive to light. That first sensor was named Thought, Ansel Adams, the Master Photographer, Said 'With our images we make the world'. Elemental forces caused the sensor to record light, from it then came an affordable SLR. The nature of photography was irrepressible!

Okay, if you're still with me after than vague Monkey Magic inspired introduction then more power to you, you're probably interested to know what this latest instalment is all about. This weekend I managed to get my hands on a Nikon D90, an enthusiast level SLR that retails for around £700. This is roughly a Nikon equivalent to my Canon 40D, although being 12 month newer it's not quite the same, however for the sake of this review it might as well be.

Canon and Nikon. Nikon and Canon. Without doubt the 2 big boys in the world of photography. I would say 95% of pros would have one of these cameras in their kit bag, historically Canon has been the market leader due to better image stabilisation in their lenses (back in the film days which allowed them to corner the pro sport shooting market) and better high ISO performance in their digital cameras (allowing for better low light photography, ideal for weddings and all sorts of other things). However any advantage than Canon once held in these areas has since been neutralised by improved Nikon technology, and many consider Nikon to have now usurped Canon as the leader of the pack. Having never spent much time with a Nikon in my hands I was eager to see what all the fuss was about, and what better camera to use than their current best seller, a camera which has received rave reviews and was the first SLR to feature HD video recording.

I'll start by saying I'm not a pixel peeper. I've never taken identical photos of the same scene with difference lenses and cameras to compare the subtle differences in the image quality. It's important that some people are doing these tests, but I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than spend my life doing this. What's important to me is how easy it is to make the camera do what I want it to do, and whether is produces a punchy image that looks good.

From Nikon Day

I found the D90 very nice to use. It felt comfortable in the hand, was intuitive to adjust and made a sexy sound when you released the shutter. There are a few more controls on the outside of the camera compared to the Canon (for instance to access the bracketing options on the Canon you need to find it in the menu, there is a button on the Nikon to fast track it), however adjusting things like ISO require 2 hands on the Nikon but can be done with just the right hand index finger on the Canon which I find preferable.

It wasn't an entirely fair comparison due to the lenses being used. My Canon lenses are lovely, they are expensive but they produce stunning images and allow me shoot at wide apertures (my 24-70 and 70-200 are both constant f/2.8) while I had just the 18-105 mid level Nikon which is a nice lens but not in the same league as I'm used to. It was great taking photos without 10kg of backpack on though.

The screen on the Nikon is breathtaking. It's the same 3 inch size as the Canon but is has over 3 times the resolution (900k pixels vs circa 300k) and it makes a world of difference. The ability to check focus accurately on camera is extremely useful and showing your pics off to mates is all the more impressive. The Nikon also has some funky slideshow features (complete with music and whatnot) which are a nice gimmick but not a real benefit for the serious photographer.

My biggest disappointment with the day was when I plugged the memory card into the comptuer. I shot in RAW to see what this puppy was capable of and was devistated to discover that my version of Lightroom (1.4) does not read RAW files from the D90 (you need to spring for Lightroom 2.0 for this). Extremely frustrating, I assume the blame lies with Adobe rather than with Nikon, but that didn't change the fact I couldn't do what I wanted to with teh images. Ironically I was forced to use the free (and excellent) Picasa software as a RAW convertor, it's preposterous that a free bit of kit provides support for something £140 worth of software doesn't. It was fun to go back to editing the images with Picasa, but ultimately it was a bit simple and I couldn't get quite the effects I was hoping for.

In conclusion my weekend proved precisely what I thought it would, that it's all much of a muchness. People used to Canon prefer the Canon system, people used to the Nikon system prefer the Nikon system. Images are pretty comparable as far as I can tell, any differences between the 2 are far less important than issues of framing and understanding of light, so my terribly vague conclusion of this hopelessly haphazard "review" is that Canon and Nikon are pretty much the same.

Tip of the week

In anew addition to the blog I've decided to have a tip of the week. This could well only last 1 week, but I've got a nice example from a shoot the other night to make my point. Here's the tip: When shooting a scene with bright lights (streelights for instance, or even shooting into the sun) use a very narrow aperture to make them appear like stars.

This shot was at f/22

From Monday night shoot with work crew

while this was shot at f/4.0 (note the street light difference)

(in case you're wondering my I didn't shoot the 2nd shot at f/22 it's because there was some rain on my lens and the narrow aperture caused it to be noticeable while f/4.0 hid it nicely)

Best Day Of 2008

2008-12-30T11:39:00.000Z

While more conventional photo blogs are posting subjects like “Best photo of 2008” (I assume, the only ones I look at never seem to get updated – you know who you are), here at simonbills.com we’re doing things a little differently. And by a little differently I mean just that, a little differently. My personal spin on the well worn topic is to bring the whole day into it, what was my best day in 2008, and what photos did I take that captured the essence of that day.

I’ll start by saying it’s impossible to narrow it down to just 1 day. In previous years I’ve had to have a good long think about my best day so this year I started the thought process early, some time in November, but even then I was well aware that some incredible adventures were yet to come so my list was far from finalised. Anyway, enough of the yip yap, I’ve managed to cull my list down to the point I can cull no further, so here we go, in chronological order, the top 4 days in 2008 for Simon Bills (of simonbills.com fame).

July 6 – Wimbledon Final

I’ve already spoken about this in a previous blog so I shant talk too much about it here, what I will do it show you a photo of how the day started…

how it ended…..

and a collection of 3 shots I put together to form 1 image, I’m thinking of blowing this up and pinning it on my wall somewhere.

August 24 – Sweden Kayaking Day 4

After 3 days of semi-gruelling kayaking through Sweden’s stunning St Anna archipelago we decided to enjoy a day of rest. The previous 2 days had started with an early breakfast before taking down tents and dismantling the camp, a necessary chore in the world of kayak camping, day 4 however did not require any such chores as we were spending that night in the same camp spot. There was a minor necessity to attend to, that of paddling over the sea for 20 minutes to drop our rubbish and collect fresh water, and Barny and I were up to the challenge. After loading up the kayak we leisurely eased our way to the other side, and while Barny was diligently sorting the rubbish for the recycling bins I went in search of fresh water. Like Burke and Wills my pursuit was relentless, but I soon realised we’d need to go for a walk, not a long walk but a walk none-the-less. It didn’t take us long to stumble upon a caravan park, and it also didn’t take us long to realise they sold ice cream in the kiosk. 5 minutes later, while we were basking in the sunshine on some park benches, Barny remarked “Man, this is great, I don’t think I’ve ever had ice cream before breakfast before”. I had to agree.

Ice creams devoured and tooth brushes purchased (my toiletries bag went missing on day 1 so the teeth for screamin’ for a cleanin’) we returned to camp with an ample supply of H20. Waiting for us was a warm campfire and some warm friends who had prepared a couple of egg of toast breakfasts for the hardy explorers, a nice little chaser to the ice cream enjoyed earlier. The rest of the day played out in a very relaxed manner, the sun was shining, the cliffs were beckoning and the mood was chilled.

From Sweden Long Weekend

(the keen observer, ok, super-keen observer, will note that the arm at the top of this photo belongs to yours truly, and as I'm not quick enough to set up a tripod, run around some rocks and get the timing bang on you've probably guessed I didn't take this shot. Photo credit goes to my Old Street Photography business partner Danny Zada)

The afternoon involved some Olympic style kayaking events, we split up into teams of 2 and had time trials to see who could paddle the fastest round that rock over there. Josh and I were clearly the team to beat, with our vast River Murray canoe trip back catalogue under our belts, however this didn’t prepare us properly for working out which rock in particular we were paddling around and we ended up going the wrong way, the long way, and finished a shameful 3rd. Kudos to Barny and Zads for taking the prize. Dinner was tasty Swedish meatballs round the fire, the beer was flowing, as were the finest cask wines Sweden had to offer, and we were all enjoying some fantastic campfire camaraderie in the shadow of one of the worlds finest sunsets.

That night a few of us headed out for a midnight paddle. The water was glass and a single stroke would take you 25 metres. Lit only by the earth’s moon we paddled to the other side and listened to the conversations of those left round the campfire as their sound waves travelled unhindered through the still night. We decided to take a slow paddle round that rock of over there and returned to the fire after an almost spiritual experience of peace.

And then I went to bed, thus ending one of my top 4 days of the year.

November 22 – First full day in Bottlierskop private game reserve

I woke to the sounds of nature from the sanctity of my tent, a million crickets, birds and baboons acting as nature’s alarm clock. Man’s alarm clock came shortly after in the form of a wake up call from reception (oh, did I mention I was sleeping in a king sized 4 poster bed in a luxury tent equipped with 2 sinks, a massive bath, a glorious outdoor shower and, get this, air conditioning?). An open top jeep was waiting for Yvonne and I up the hill and the animals were waiting to have their photos taken. We enjoyed a cup of tea and a rusk out on the deck as I came to terms with being awake at 5:30am.

From Vleesbaai and Bottlierskop

The morning game drive was great, we saw a bunch of crazy creatures doing what they do, and I managed to get some nice happy snaps in the process, but as I’ve already talked about this in a previous blog I won’t go into it any further. Hot towels and a hot breakfast were waiting for us on our return to the lodge, and soon after I was enjoying a hot shower in the aforementioned outdoor facility. After a brief cruise on the river we settled in by the pool for the afternoon, and with drinks and snacks on command it was impossible not to relax and get through a few pages of Midnight’s Children (yeah, that’s right, I read classy books). A tasty bespoke lunch was followed by an afternoon nap, which in turn was followed by a game drive to go see the lions. Again, you’ve seen some lion shots in the previous blog, what I will say is that the lions were a lot more active than when we’d seen them the day before, and the light shining down on them was conducive to some lovely photos.

We were presented with a sherry on our return to the lodge and enjoyed a couple of sun downers on the deck pre-dinner. Dinner itself included some exotic game meats (including zebra, tastes just like horse) accompanied by an nice bottle of merlot, a perfect way to end a perfect day.

December 23 – Northern Lights in Norway

A trip to Norway to see the northern lights is like a trip to the casino, you can either strike it lucky and have the time of your life, or you can come up short and return home with your tail between your legs and your wallet significantly lighter (£6 or AU$15 beers will do that for you). We had 4 days booked in, and with the lights supposedly coming out 2 nights in 3 we were reasonably confident, but the forecast of clouds and rain and snow did not bode well for the clear skies which are required.

December 23 started early. By the time my alarm sounded at 5:30 my fractured sleep had already been interrupted by countless false alarms, brought on by the fear that I’d overslept and missed the train to the airport, the flight, the lights, the rest of my life. Despite climbing out of bed at the planned time my inablilty to manage time properly when I’m in the spell of a lovely warm shower resulted in my usual fast walk / jog / full blown sprint to Liverpool St Station to board the Stansted Express and make the flight.

It’s a surreal experience boarding a plane at 9am, when it’s light, then proceeding to fly into darkness. We touched down some time around 1pm local time and there wasn’t a lot of light in the sky; with Tromso being deep within the artic circle and the winter solstice having taken place only 2 days earlier we knew the sun would never rise above the horizon in our four days. After a quick taxi ride and a seemless check in we decided to explore the town while there was still a tiny amount of light remaining. There had been quite heavy snow soon before we arrived, but we were welcomed by clear skies so the magic of an pristine arctic town blanketed in Chistmas white with deep blue skies made the whole scene feel like a fairy tale. By 2:30 the sky was pitch black and I was spotting stars. Unreal.

While it’s possible to see the lights from town the best views are away from all the light pollution. We’d not planned on taking a trip on our first night, but with no guarantee of clear skies for future nights we decided to book something last minute, and I’m so glad we did. A 30 minute ride took us to the Tromso Wilderness Centre where 200 huskies were waiting for us, we’d planned on leaving a husky ride for later in the trip but rain the following day washed away the snow and out dream of dogs pulling us over it. We’d been patting, wrestling and generally immersing ourselves in dog for about half an hour when the guide pointed upwards and said “There’s the aurora, just starting”. It looked like a faint long white cloud, not quite what I was expecting, but I instantly lost all interest in the dogs and wanted to get further away from human lights to maximise the viewing experience.

I set up the camera and captured this white cloud on my digital sensor, when I reviewed the image I was thrilled to see the white long cloud was in fact green! I’d captured the lights!!

From Tromso and the Northern Lights

But it was about to get a whole lot better. Over the next 20 minutes the aurora gained in size, the green become more prominent, and it started appearing in all parts of the sky. Looking east I was blown away by the swirling beams of light, then when I looked west another one was starting up that usurped the eastern aurora in every regard. Soon enough the whole sky was lit up by green fingers of light dancing slowly through the atmosphere and my eyes filled with tears, unable to register what they were seeing. In total the lights were out for close to 2 hours, with the peak time lasting for about 40 minutes.

A friend had advised me to not take photos when I saw the lights and to just watch them and take them in. Obviously this was impossible, there was no way I could have sat there peacefully and allowed such an incredible scene to go unphotographed. Fortunately when taking these shots I was using a 30 second exposure (at f/4.0 with ISO 400) so once I set up the tripod and pressed click I was able to bask in what I was witnessing for an uninterrupted 30 seconds. Once the exposure was done there was a frantic further 30 seconds or so setting up the new shot before being rewarded with another blissful 30 seconds of sweetness.

If I was going for the best hour of 2008 this one wins hands down, and would be well in the hunt for the best hour of my life. And to be honest I think perhaps this one is just a bee’s dick ahead of the other 3 days in the battle for day of 2008, but then again perhaps I’m only saying this because it’s still so fresh.

No matter which way you spin it I’ve been incredibly lucky this year to have seen the things I’ve seen, and the beauty of photography is that in 40 years time I’ll be able to look back at these photos and trigger something in the mind, a long forgotten memory, that hopefully puts me back there. As time goes on we tend to have a romanticised view of past events, so I’m looking forward to how my mind remembers these days, as they were as close to perfect as you could imagine without any mind romanticism required. Or have I romanticised them already?

Attack of the rhino bride

2008-12-20T13:49:00.000Z

About a month ago I rolled the dice on Air Namibia hoping they could take me all the way to Cape Town safely, I had to go see about about a girl. I also had to go see about shooting some African wildlife (the good kind of shooting, with a camera) which was a new experience for me and something I was looking forward to a lot.

Something I've never understood is people who specialise in one type of photography but are inept at another type. The more I shoot different subjects the more I'm convinced it's all fundamentally the same, compose your photo in an interesting way with a nice balance to it, use foreground interest and leading lines to draw the viewers eye into the shot, make sure the eye is in focus (whether you're shooting a bride or a rhino), try to place things on the rule of thirds (if practical) and try to capture a unique moment rather then simply recording what you saw. Of course making sure the light is right goes without saying.

Interesting Composition

Zebras are very likeable animals, they pose well for photos, have awesome markings on their fur and don't taste half bad with a nice bottle of merlot. I've got 2 photos here which demonstrate my point about interesting composition. The first one is a nice enough photo, the light is good, the markings look great but it's ultimately just a zebra standing in a field, it doesn't tell a story, the animal's not engaging with the camera, and it's ultimately a forgettable image. This next one I think has far more going for it. For starters the Zebra is looking down the barrel of the lens, it's got a few more zebras in the background which aren't distracting (as they're out of focus) but they give the image a bit more context, and you can also see his little mo-hawk. I've put the horizon a little close to the edge of the frame for my liking, but apart from that I quite like it. Although looking back at that first shot it's growing on me too! I guess you'll have to make up your own mind.

Foreground Interest

The day after arrival Yvonne and I headed up table mountain in Cape Town (cricket fans would recognise this as the mountain behind the Newlands ground). Several hours after joining the queue we made it to the top, the electricity crisis meant the cable car was operating at half pace using their back up supply. Once we finally reached the top we realised we'd picked a great day for the trip. The views were stunning, the light lovely and the clouds were whispy and low (we were looking down on them). I decided the best way to capture the scene was with my Sigma 10-20 lens, but after shooting off a few frames I realised the shots lacked something, there was nothing in the shot to draw the eye to and while it was a beautiful scene the photo didn't really capture it. At this point I commissioned my faithful model to act as a bit of foreground interest which helped balance things compositionally but also made the viewer wish they were there. (I think my main motivation when taking travel photos is to make the viewer jealous they're not there. I'm not sure if this is a good photographic technique or a bad ego driven character trait!)

From Stellenbosch and Capetown

Rule of Thirds

As the time passed on top of the mountain a band of clouds rolled in and created a totally different perspective on things. The beach views had been replaced by a blanket of white, and the resulting photos turned out nicely. This shot is a pretty good example of putting things on the rule of thirds and balancing the image nicely, the peak of Lion's Head sits nicely on upper right third, and the cable car is near enough to the opposite third. As soon as I took this shot I knew it would work perfectly in B & W.

From Stellenbosch and Capetown

Leading Lines

Yvonne's folks live on a beautiful winery so we'd often head there towards to end of the day and take her dog for a walk through the vineyards. We stumbled upon a big pile of wood not too far from the house which screamed "Take my photo" so I did. I experimented with different angles and apertures and shutter speed (getting Yvonne to walk past at varying paces to capture some motion blur) and I think this was probably my favourite. Not convinced I absolutely nailed it but it's a nice example of using leading lines to draw the eye into a photo.

From Stellenbosch and Capetown

Focus on the Eye

I remember Dad telling me years ago that when shooting people you always need to make sure the eye is in focus. You get this right and the rest doesn't matter. I decided to apply this advice to animals (an indeed anything which has an eye - should I ever encounter a hurricane I'll know what to do). This shot is also works due to the texture of the rhino's skin which is interesting enough in its own right.

From Vleesbaai and Bottlierskop

Capturing Moments

A dog walking through a vineyard in lovely late afternoon light, sure, a nice photo, but a dog shaking his head wildly in the same vineyard with the same lovely late afternoon light? Now we're talking. I shot this one of Fiela (spelling's probably wrong, can't wrap my head round Afrikaans) after seeing her do a similar head shaking thing moments earlier but failing to capture it properly. I registered my disappointment to Yvonne who said "I can make her do it again, I just have to pull on the back of neck like this". Before this next shake I was able to set the camera up as I wanted (10-20 lens set to 14mm, high speed burst mode so I could hold my finger on the shutter and see 6.5 frames for every second) and get down nice and close to capture it from an unusual angle which I like to call squirrel's eye view (or dassie's eye view if you're from SA). There were about 4 frames that worked nicely but this was probably my fave due to the ears at the angles and the teeth poking out.

From Stellenbosch and Capetown

Finally my favourite photo from the trip. We went on a tour through one of the townships in Cape Town, in interesting experience to say the least. I'm a bit tired after writing all this (and because my jerk next door neighbours were playing loud music till 2am just 1 thin wall away from my head last night) so I won't go into details of what townships are, but if you're interested I'm sure google will fill you in. Anyway, we were being shown around a church / community centre when I spotted these kids peering in through the door, it was split second moment that ended almost as quickly as it started, but I managed to get the camera out in time to shoot 2 frames, one of which was rubbish but the other of which looked like this.

From Stellenbosch and Capetown

I might take this opportunity to give another shout out to google's Picasa software, it's free and it's brilliant for any budding photographers. I use Lightroom for most of stuff, but I've just downloaded the latest Picasa update and discovered I can make videos of it! I obviously had to give this a go, and wasn't surprised to find it was all too easy. Anyway, I uploaded it to Youtube and this is how it's turned out. (this is only 1 of my 2 albums from the trip, if you're interested you can follow the links on any of the photos about to check out the complete gallery at my Picasa site).

Pictures of exciting times

2008-11-03T18:55:00.000Z

In the spirit of pushing the barriers of the photographic art form, and going places more conventional photographers fear to tread, this week’s instalment of Billo’s Photos will not contain any photos. Take that Annie Leibowitz.

No, instead of showing off some dazzling photos from the week just been, and coming up with some insightful observations, I have decided to shine a spot light into the inner workings of how the blog works. I also get to combine this with my other passion – statistics!

“Statistics can be used to prove anything Kent; fourteen percent of people know that”

SO, when I signed up with this rollercoaster ride back in March I also signed up to Google Analytics, it’s another great free product from Google which allows you to keep track of all sorts of things regarding your website or blog. Here are a few high level stats to get things started, don’t worry, I’ll be going into more detail later on:

* 752 visits so far resulting in 1,099 page views (when your whole site is basically one long page you wouldn’t expect page views to be much higher than visits)

* 349 unique visitors – I don’t know who all you people are but thanks for stopping by!

* Average time on site 1 minute 10 seconds. Can’t read too much into this as I suspect a good number of viewings were just confirming I still hadn’t updated it.

* Most hits in 1 day was on April 8 when I announced to the world via email and facebook that this baby was live and 31 of you stopped by to kick the tyres. A bit disconcerting that once everyone saw what it was all about this lofty total hasn’t been reached again, although I did get a total of 41 hits over 2 days after last week’s long overdue update which was encouraging.

I’ve got loads of other info on what browsers people use to access the site (65% Explorer, 27% Firefox and 4 visits with Seamonkey, whatever that is?) but that’s not all that interesting.

What is slightly more interesting is where people are accessing the site from. As expected the big 2 are UK and Australia with 289 and 254 hits respectively, we’ve got USA a clear third with 128 visits with the vast majority coming from New York (is that you Brian?) although 19 states are represented. Some of the more unusual and unexpected visits have come from Colombia, Israel, Turkey, Brazil, Slovenia, Latvia, Chile, India, Poland and the Czech Republic – especially unexpected as I don’t think I know anyone living in these countries! All up there are 27 countries who can proudly lay claim to its residents viewing the majesty of simonbills.com.

Now, onto the interesting stuff. Most of the visits come from direct hits, ie, typing simonbills.com into the address bar in your browser (or clicking the bookmark you’ve all no doubt made to speed up the process by 1.4 seconds), however my friends over at Google have sent a bit of business my way by people searching for the following things:

* “Live East Die Young” – this one brings more traffic than any other search, 14 visits to be precise. I’ve since done my own google search of this phrase and discovered I’m on the first page of the results which would explain things.

* “Pictures of punks in Camden” – 4 searchers have found their way into my world by searching for this phrase. I’ve also received some traffic from “Camden Punks”, “Punk’s pictures Camden 2008” (if I can figure out a way to block people with bad grammar I will), “punks in Camden photos”, “recent photos of punks in Camden” and even a typo “punks in cambden” which means that I must also have the same typo on my site. Ooops.

* Speaking of typo’s I’m google’s NUMBER ONE RESPONSE for the search “Mini pojects”. I think typos are the way forward actually, if you spell things correctly you get lost in the sea of other literate web nerds, but by misspelling certain important things you’re likely to come up much higher in google rankings for cretins.

* There are practical ones “backlighting for photos”, and “photos from sigma 10-20”

* Some precise ones “bride walking down the isle (sic) and groom comes out late”

* Some exciting ones “pictures of exciting times” and “exciting photos”

* Disturbing ones “picasa- webalbum young kids” and “picasa-webalbum young boys”

* A self indulgent one “beardvember Gerhard”

* And at least one particularly unusual one “picture of jigs white smoke”

My challenge to you, faithful readers, is to see how obscure you can make a search and have it lead to my blog. Go ahead, make my day.

Oh, and the other reason I elected to fly in the face of convention and post a photoless update is because the only photo I took this week was of the TV we’re looking to sell, and there really wasn’t any artistic merit to this (let me know if you’re in the market for a tele by the way, a lovely 32 inch Sony number, not a plasma or LCD but a very nice picture and excellent sound - £100).

Quick update on last week's post- we gave the couple a slideshow last night and it went down very well, they mentioned that in the end there were 760 guests that turned up. Insanity.

My big fat Asian wedding

2008-10-28T21:41:00.000Z

When my business parter Danny and I put out a few ads out 6 months ago offering our services as wedding photographers one of the first responses was from Shabnam asking if we'd be interested in covering her Muslim Bengali wedding. As a couple of cocksure young snappers there was no job we wouldn't take, no job too small, and in this instance no job too big.

As the big day approached it began to dawn on us that this would be a pretty big operation. For a start there were going to be 650 guests, more than double the total number of guests in the 3 weddings we'd covered to date, furthermore Asian weddings run very differently to those we'd shot before and attended as guests. The groom has a seperate ceremony to the bride, and neither are at the other's ceremony. The groom's ceremony was covered by Danny and had several hundred guests, I was lucky enough to cover the bride's ceremony which as simply held in a small suite at the hotel and had less than a dozen people in attendance.

One of the people in the suite with me was the videographer (there were 2 of these, along with Danny and myself taking the photos, plus a friend of the couple who was wanting some practice shooting weddings and shadowed us all day). I was a little aprehensive about being too intrusive at such an intimate ceremony, but the videographer had no such reservations and seemed to have no problem holding his camera less than 30cm away from people's faces and shining his light striaght into their eyes. This worked very nicely for me for a couple of reasons, firstly I felt a lot better about shooting with my loud shutter, and secondly his video light provided some lovely mood lighting for my shots.

After the formalities were over I finally had a 20 minute window to get some bridal portraits (I'd been at the venue for a couple of hours already but didn't have to chance to take shots of her getting ready as I had expected). I've got a theory that as long as you know what you're doing, have the right equipment and know how to use it, taking great photos is all about putting yourself in the right place at the right time. That place and time was now. There was some lovely soft light coming in through the window of the suite onto the bed, there was a stunning bride dressed in the most ornate dress I'd ever seen with amazingly intricate henna all over her hands and arms. The photos basically took themselves.

After these shots there was a bit of down time while we waited for the groom to finish his ceremony and the 650 guests to enjoy their starters. A kind soul brought some of these starters into the suite for us to eat and it was without question the most delicious Indian food I've ever had. Eventually the bride and her siblings got themselves together and made the entrance into the main hall. Picture the scene, there's 3 official photographers, 2 official videographers, countless other punters sporting SLRs, point and shoots and mobile phones all jostling for the best position, it was the closest thing to a paparazzi scrum I've ever been involved in.

The cutting of the cake was no different.

The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, a chaotic assortment of unpredictable events and situations that we had to be ready to capture. Kids are always great subject for photos and there must have been 200 of the things running around screaming all day, it was tough keeping any of them still for long enough to get a shot, but I did like this one.

6 days till we give the couple a slideshow and I've still got some final editing to do, I've managed to put it of for the last half hour or so thanks to this blog but I need to get into it shortly. All in all I was very pleased with how our photos have turned out, it was a manic, exhausting and often challenging day, but when you're sitting on the train on the way home with the knowledge that you've got some amazing images in the memory cards in your pocket it makes it all worthwhile. And now we've got some Asian wedding photos in our portfolio this could open up a whole new market, a market with over 1.1 billion people in India alone!

Here Comes The Photographer

2008-07-28T15:56:00.001+01:00

A few weeks ago I took my second tentative step into the big bad world of professional photography. With a solitary maternity shoot as my only paid work to date (not including a free trip around Ireland for some promotion snaps this time last year) I took on the challenge of recording photographically the most important day in the young lives of a very trusting couple as their “official wedding photographer”.

It’s fair to say I had a few restless nights in the lead up.

I think there’s a view around most of the population that wedding photography is a licence to print money, you rock up for half a day, take a few photos then send the bill for a couple of thou (for the record my fee was no where this amount!). I knew that this wasn’t the case, but I didn’t really know just how much work is involved, especially when it’s your first and you need to learn things for the first time.

Something I learned is that the more work you do before the day the less trouble you have on the day, the problem was that most of the work I was doing before the day was making sure I had enough memory cards, enough spare batteries, another body in case the main body malfunctioned, the right lenses and also that I had the technical know-how to complete the job to a professional standard. This involved reading books on wedding photography, doing research on nightclub photography (while the reception wasn’t at a nightclub I knew there would be dancing shots in low light and I wanted to know the techniques available to create different images), learning how my flash works inside out (learning how to use a flash properly is far more technical than learning how to use a camera properly) and generally looking through hundreds of wedding images online to get inspiration and ideas for poses and angles.

What I should have been doing before the day was building rapport with the couple to make sure they were comfortable around me and the camera, going to the venue to scout out locations, getting a running schedule for the day, working out where photography was fitting in, and communicating with the couple about expectations. The way it turned out we basically did things on the fly on the day, but within the scope of what I had broadly planned, and realistically this is probably how the vast majority of weddings will run, if the bride turns up half an hour late this could throw a strictly regimented day into chaos so the photographer’s role is to roll with the punches, remain calm and get on with the job.

The couple didn’t want any photos of them getting ready so I met the groom at the church. I arrived an hour before the ceremony to meet the priest, have a chat about where I could stand, whether I could use flash, those sorts of things, and generally scope out the place for any good ops. As luck would have it the church was beautiful and ideal for photos. Soon enough the groom arrived, as did the groomsmen, guests, bridesmaids and finally the bride. I took this photo of the bride walking down the aisle, I think it shows off the beauty of the church and has a really nice symmetry about it, I also love how the white of the dress is in stark contrast to the darkness around it.

My favourite part of the day was shooting during the ceremony. It was slower, more predicable, people didn’t move much and there was plenty of time to compose the shots exactly as I wanted them. I moved around a little bit through the ceremony as the next 3 shots show, the place I took the final shot from was excellent, as I was obscured from most of the congregation so as to remain unobtrusive, but I was in the perfect place to get shots of the couple’s faces and provide a view that none of the guests had. The lack of flash during the ceremony made my decision last year to get the f/2.8 stabilised version of my 70-200 lens totally justified, likewise my decision to invest in a monopod a few days before the big event.

I was quite keen to take a nice group shot at some stage during the day, later on at the reception I managed to get up high and shoot down on everyone which was quite effective, but right after the ceremony, while everyone was out the front of the church, I switched to my Sigma 10-20 ultra wide angle and got a shot of the whole scene which I think worked quite nicely. Just looking at it now I’ve noticed something in the shot that annoys me – your challenge, dear reader, is to find this annoyance and leave a comment telling me what it is! First one to find it gets a high from me when we next meet.

While I’m here this is the group shot I took later on, I’ve since cropped it tighter to make the people bigger, it’s really a shot that needs to be printed as big as possible.

Ok, I think I might actually leave this wedding here, half way through, and return for the 2nd half next week (or will it be later this week? You’ll have to keep checking to find out). I will say that I gave the couple a viewing on Friday night and they were thrilled with the photos, and at the risk of getting big headed the words “I’m so glad we chose you and not the other photographer we were looking at” did come out of the groom’s mouth, although perhaps that was the rum they procured on their Cuban honeymoon talking (which was muchos tasty gracias). Until next time…

The Greatest Of All Time

2008-07-13T12:29:00.000+01:00

First up apologies for not updating this thing for a month, I had the folks over for a week and didn't update it then, after that there was some other reason I didn't do it, next thing I knew a full month had passed. It's it's not through lack of photos either, I've been pretty busy snapping away this last month.

I decided some shots I took this time last week were probably an excellent place to start. I managed to procure myself a ticket to the men's final at Wimbledon, which turned out to be in the 2nd row and close enough that both players could hear me shouting "COME ON ROG". To say it was a good day is perhaps the understatement of the year, from start to finish - including breaks - it went for about 7 hours, and I wasn't getting sick of it at all. If it wasn't almost pitch black at the end I could happily have sat through several more hours. The quality of the tennis was absolutely breathtaking, at least once every game through all five sets I made a comment along the lines of "What? That's not possible" after one of the warriors blasted an impossible winner off a shot that would have been a winner against anyone else on tour. 5 hours of play hadn't desensitised me at all to this genius, I've seen a fair bit of top level tennis in my time and these guys were so far ahead of anything I'd seen it was ridiculous.

So, on to the photography. I managed to get my 40D and 70-200L f/2.8 into the ground which was pleasing, the conditions on the ticket say photography is allowed but you can't use the images for commercial gain but you never know the reaction of an overzealous security guard when you try and bring in a huge white lens. Fortunately they were more concerned about the 4 x 250ml cans of Pimms I attempted to bring in, you were only allowed 2 cans and my argument that these cans are half the size of regular cans fell on deaf ears. Rules is rules. If you want to know where I was sitting it was the corner that Nadal ran to after the match to get into his coaches box, I could have patted him on the shoulder but I was too busy trying to take his photo, you know you're close to the action when the athlete is too close for the camera to focus on. These shots give you an idea of our position (I went with my flatmate Dave who wore a bright pink shirt which was a master stoke of being identified on tv), and how close we were to the pro photographers (well, one group of them anyway).

(just as a side note that guy on the far left looking at me taking his photo is the chief sports photographer for the times and wrote this article about the final)

So, now you're sufficiently jealous of my positioning it's time to hit you with some action shots. I took over 1100 photos on the day, which is a lot, but sports photography is a game of hit and miss to an extent, the more you take the more chance you have of getting that killer shot with the ball right on the strings, or that split second facial expression, a prime example of one of these shots is this one. It was a combination of new balls, back lighting on the fluff and a bit luck, but they all come together for a cool shot.

Of the 1100 photos I'd say close to 70% were of Nadal. There are several reasons for this.
a) He's more photogenic, ie better facial expressions when he hits the ball, ridiculous arms that translate well to photos, etc
b) At my end I could only get shots of Feds face when he hit forehands, and Rafa was really pumping it to Feds backhand so I didn't bother taking too many photos of his back
c) When Rafa hit his backhands he was facing me, and a backhand is a more photogenic shot than a forehand which often tend to look a bit awkward when frozen in time
d) Rafa won and I reeled off close to 300 after the match of his celebrations, crowd invasions, trophy acceptance and what not.

Here are some of my favourite action shots from the day.

I was looking in the paper and internet before the final this year and realised that most shots that got published were not action shots but shots of players fist pumping or somehow showing emotion. It's so tempting to put the camera down once the point is finished but the trick to capturing great shots is the know the feel of the game, understand the massive points and the likely reactions of the players and make sure your lens is pointed in their direction if they win those massive points. For this reason I pretty much missed the epic 4th set tie break as I was glued to Nadal to get his reaction when he won (which everyone thought he'd do when he was up 5-2). Still though, small price to pay as I managed to watch LOADS of tennis with the camera safely stowed in my backpack.

So there you have it, memories and photos that will last a lifetime.

Oh, other exciting news, I photographed my first wedding last weekend as well, it went really well and I'll put some shots up here in my next posting. Take it easy.

Photoshopping

2008-06-12T21:32:00.000+01:00

The devil makes work for idle hands. At least he did last Friday night when I was home alone with a camera and a tripod. Yes, it was time for Simon to do some experimenting. With Photoshop.

Now, I'm not much of a Photoshopper, I use Lightroom for my image editing which basically consists of some levels adjustments, perhaps some dust removal and occasionally some cropping (although I like to get it right in camera where possible). After returning from Italy I had a couple of photos that were really nice, but had an unsightly pole or something ruining an otherwise great image so I decided to have a go at cloning some of these distractions out.

Original

Edit

But this wasn't how I spent my Firday night. Oh no. All this did was whet my appetite for the power at my fingertips with this revolutionary bit of software (I briefly considered selling my camera and going pro as a Photoshop artiste but decided I was getting a bit carried away, despite my absolutely excellent cloning work). So, Friday. I decided to experiment with layers, which I've never done before, so I came up with an idea that involved taking several photos and cutting and pasting them together to make a new creation. By this stage my flatmate Dave had returned home so I summoned him to the hallway and took a few head shots, then got him to do the same for me, I then got him to make the peace sign with his hand and took a few shots of that. All the shots were taken with a hand-held external flashgun to provide a bit of side light. From here I went to work, this is the result.

Now, after completing my creation I unleashed it to the world on Facebook, but to my horror the following comments were flung in my direction:

- It's a bit creepy
- Vanessa agrees it's creepy
- Dude, that is seriously weird. You should use your Photoshop skills for good instead of evil.
- Dave, do you feel violated

It was clear I had to make another creation. And to be fair, I did think it was a bit gay once I'd finished it but I was so pleased with my layering skills I was temporarily blinded to this fact. Another thing I wasn't really happy with on mark 1 was the inconsistent light between the heads (mine is darker) and the lacklustre background. Here's what I came up with next.

I was much more pleased with this effort. I used the sky from a cactus shot in Cinque Terra as the background and made the heads smaller and less like they were about to make out. I think you'll all agree this new one is far less creepy. So, there you have it, this is what happens when no one invites me out for a drink on a Friday night, I get weird and nerd-like. Be it on your head if I descend any further into the pits of computer nerd hell.

Punks and Mini-Pojects

2008-06-02T21:17:00.000+01:00

Now, if you're one of my regular readers (dad, ?, .......) you'll have been waiting with feverish excitement these last 6 days, on the edge of your seat dreaming up what this mini-project mystery I promised last week could possibly be. Well, wait no more. I bought a head torch a few months back with the grand plan of using it in a long exposure rear curtain flash experiment, and Monday of last week I found myself with a few hours to kill and the house to myself. Like any normal person would in a similar position I took out the tripod, attached the camera (complete with flashgun), strapped the torch to my noggin and began experimenting. I learned pretty early on that this would be a good way of writing letters, and what better word to paint with light that "Simon", the name above all names. As if this wasn't exciting enough I decided to give it an exclamation mark to seal the deal. I used photoshop to stitch the 6 photos together, this is about the extent of my photoshop skills but as I once read on a bus ticket a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. All shots were taken at f/8.0, 4 seconds, ISO 100, rear curtain flashgun, tripod.

On the weekend I went on a walk from Camden to Maida Vale along the canal with my friend Emma and some of her friends. I was running at a bit late but fortunately the others were running even later so I had the chance to take a few shots at Camden before they arrived. I spotted a row of punks sitting on a wall with a Camden sign in the background so decided to sneakily take their shots from behind with the word "Camden" clearly in the frame to give the shot some reference. I was so chuffed with myself after nailing this shot I excitedly ran under a bridge to inspect my handiwork in a dark area. Disappointed. The shot didn't really jump like I was expecting, there was a big distracting pole right in the middle, basically I wasn't happy.

Emma and her cohorts still hadn't arrived so I returned to the punks in pursuit of something with more impact. My idea was the get a shot without them posing, just a natural reportage style image, but this was going to be tricky with the hundreds of tourists and whatnot in the vicinity. I noticed someone was having their photo taken with them, and I figured it would be rude to just take someone's photo without asking permission (although it doesn't seem to bother this guy)...

...so I asked one of the punks if he minded if I took his photo. "One pound" was the reply. Bloody sell outs, a real punk would have told me to F off, punks these days.... Anyway, I figured that was a pretty cheap price to pay for what had the potential to be a great image so I coughed up. Apparently £1 gets you more than punks just sitting, they pose for you, give you the finger and snarl at the camera. Nice. I took 2 shots, the first one didn't quite capture the Camden sign properly but the second one seemed to fit it all in nicely. I didn't dare take a third unless the punk on the right flew into a strongbow fuelled rage.

After these shots I was happy to put the camera away and leave it there. I didn't take it out at all on the walk, it was actually remarkably pleasant not stopping to shoot everything, might have to look into that again some time! At the end of the trip we decided to wet our respective whistles, the others were getting out their point and shoots so I felt like I had to get mine out. I took this one of Emma, she always complains about me putting unflattering photos of her on the internet so hopefully this one will send the balance back the other way!

Who knows what this week has in store for Billo, but you can rest easy in the knowledge it will be documented and reported here some time soon.

Italy - the other days

2008-05-27T22:16:00.000+01:00

As I was poking round Stanstead airport waiting for my flight to Genoa (or Genova if you're Italian - why do countries feel the need to change the names of cities in other countries?) I noticed one of the airport bookstores featuring signs proudly boasting "Exclusive airport edition" for many of their books. Has anyone in the history of humanity ever purchased a book at an airport simply because it's an airport exclusive edition? A particularly ardent Katie Price fan who already has the hardcover and regular paperback version of "Being Jordan" and needs the airport edition to complete the trilogy perhaps? Or maybe there are those who buy 1p Ryanair flights simply to get on the other side of airport security and gain access to the treasure trove of airport exclusive delights that exist in the land of plenty. While I'm on Ryanair, how can you take an airline seriously that offers 2 for 1 drink specials on spirits (who are they in competition with for drinks up there?) and has hostesses selling scratchy tickets on every flight?

Right, enough of the introduction, let's get down to some photos. The following are some of my favourites from the trip. It's tough to pick a handful of shots for something like this, especially as there are so many diverse shots, but here's what I've gone with.

First up we've got a super simple shot that is perhaps my favourite from the trip. I notices these glorious colourful umbrellas and thought they'd go nicely with the washing hanging up behind them. I wanted to go for a really clean composition, something from the "less is more" school of photography, initially I took some shots in landscape which I liked but thought were not quite right, when I decided to switch it to portrait that's when I became properly happy with it.

This next guy was hidden away. There was this mini bridge type thing which people seemed to think made a good photo, then if you snuck under the mini bridge you found this cave type thing which those who ventured that far also thought made a good photo. I took it a step further and went as far as a could down the cave and was rewarded with this fisherman casting off. I was shooting into the light so I really had no option but to play the silhouette card, I converted to B & W in Lightroom later on the PC as the original colours didn't really work.

I'm convinced that photo opportunities are placed in your lap by Aperturian (the god of photography) if you're prepared to seize these moments when they come. After a big day of hiking I was enjoying a tasty lager overlooking Vernazza when this cat comes out of nowhere and jumps up on to the wall right in front of me. I'd been taking photos earlier and happened to have the flashgun already attached to the camera, all of which was sitting on the table, all I had to do was raise the camera, frame the shot and make meow noises until the cat gave me some eye contact. Too easy.

I'll finish up with a couple of classic postcard shots. Well, they're not actually as good as the ones on the post cards (my excuse is that these postcard photographers have more than 4 days to get the perfect lighting and the perfect ocean conditions - that's my line and I'm sticking to it) but they'll give you more of an idea of what the place was actually like. The region consists of 5 colourful towns built onto steep hills/cliffs in little bays, each town between 1 and 5km from the next. A very picturesque part of the world indeed. This first shots was taken from a boat, I think the second was taken from the walking trail.

Right, my Picasa seems to have crapped itself so you'll have to make do with just the 1 postcard shot for now.

I did a little mini project the other day, stay tuned as I will be unveiling it exclusively here at some stage in the next 7 days.......

Till then.

Italy - 1.5 days in

2008-05-21T18:21:00.000+01:00

One thing about the Italians, they sure love to smoke. I think it's pretty common in continental Europe but compared to London there are a lot of Marlborough men and women. Had a pretty transport intensive trip over here, it went walk, train, plane, bus, train, walk; it might not sound like much but when you've got 14kg of camera and laptop on your front and slightly more on the back (including a hefty tripod) all this picking up and carrying becomes pretty hard word.

I've met up with Mum and Dad in Levanto, a lovely little town just to the North of the Cinque Terra. For the next week or so the folks are traveling with friends of theirs from back home who I also know, a lovely classic Australian couple Anne and Chris. It was raining the night I first arrived and when I met Chris he was wielding an umbrella and proudly told me of his bartering conquest "I bought this off a guy in Napoli who tried to rip me off, he wanted €5 but I talked him down to €2.65". Yes, that's right, 2 Euro 65 Euro cents. Brilliant.

Today we headed to Rio-something, the bottom town of the 5. Lovely little spot. We managed to hike our way 2 towns up so we've seen 3 so far, it's kind of hard to describe these places, and after a few lazy beers after a full day's walking I don't have the patience to try so I'll just show you some photos.

Enough is ENOUGH! I'm sick of these mother f*cking dogs on this mother f*cking train! (Snakes on a Plane reference)

I really like this shot of Dad for some reason, don't ask me why.

I was well chuffed with this cactus shots. I took a few others and in the main they were, well, cactus, so it was nice to get a good one.

Really love this one, we were walking down a tunnel and I had the 10-20 lens on so I just did some experiementing, this one has the feel of an after life experience I reckon.

Lazy Italian dogs...

So, there you have it, 5 shots that could be taken anywhere in the world. If you want to see standard stunning shots of Cinque Terra do a google images or Flickr search, I might even post a few of my own in good time, until then I hope you enjoy these ones.

Yet another glorious victory

2008-05-18T21:49:00.000+01:00

If you're a regular follower of my blog you may have read this post a few months back. Rather than give you the background to the Shoot London events again I'll suggest you take a squiz at the other entry and then return to this one.

So this time round the event was held at the Tate Modern, an enormous unique structure (formerly a power station?) in the postcard-photo epicenter of London. A short walk to the West will take you to the London Eye, and a little further Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, a stroll to the East will take you through the famous Borough Market, London Bridge (which is a non event for the record) and on to the iconic Tower Bridge, while a waltz North over the millennium bridge will take you to St Paul's Cathedral. Needless to say there were landmarks galore to capture, but as we are band of photographic mavericks we shunned these so called "great photos" and instead opted for our own take on London's Southbank. Or maybe it was because we didn't understand the clues so shot the wrong thing.

Indeed,it was actually us shooting the wrong thing that earned us another winners badge. The clue was something about a monument and the answer was St Pauls Cathedral, I still don't really get how the answer fitted the clue but it doesn't matter. Dave had been wanting to model his Sherlock Holmes hat in a photo for a while, and as we were told a week before the shoot that the theme was "senses" we figured there would be a clue involving sight that we could tailor to our props. In the week before I'd gone out at lunch time and purchased a magnifying glass, the idea being we'd take a shot with Sherlock looking at the camera with one eye magnified. Turns out the prop I got was too big so another team member Danny went and got a smaller one on the Friday, he also picked up a pipe and the props were complete. Can't remember who came up with the idea for the shot, but I remember Bec thought it was stupid and not funny at all, however we told her that boys find that stuff funny and we were proved right.

Next up we have the first photo of the day. The clue here was "See no evil, hear no evil, speak to evil". I searched my ipod for songs with the word "evil" in them, didn't find any but I find "The devil is bad" by the W's so I thought that would be a good fit. We wanted to go for a Guantanamo Bay feel with the lighting. I picked up an off camera flash cord on my magnifying glass expedition from earlier in the week which allowed us to get this cool side lighting effect. I really liked this shot, we were all talking ourselves up after it, thinking we'd just hand in the one photo for the day safe in the knowledge we had a prize winner. Wait, I don't think I'm supposed to tell the world about our arrogance.....

The answer to the next clue was Borough Market so we just took a shot of us having lunch. I used my Sigma 10-20 set pretty wide to capture as much as possible, I set the exposure for .8 of a second to create a blur in the background and used rear curtain flash to freeze the subjects. I like how Dave in the middle is dead still and anchors the shot while Bec and Danny are moving a bit and people in the background are moving even more. For the record my wild boar sausage was exceptional, although my wild boar burps later in the day were less so.

To close things out we've got our most technically difficult shot of the day. Again we suspected there may be a clue involving smell, and we were right. It's actually quite tricky to capture clearly the spray from a perfume bottle - as I learned on a Wednesday night practice session 4 days before the shoot (Andy's girlfriend was quizzing us the following day why her boyfriend was returning home smelling of men's cologne) - the trick is to shoot with a black background and have the spray lit frmo behind. The off camera flash really came into its own on the shot, unfortunately the cord only allows the flash to get around 50cm away from the camera, but I got Danny to hold it right up against the wall and point it back towards the camera getting as little light as possible on the wall. As you can see we did light the wall up a little on the left of the frame, but considering our equipment limitations and the fact that any editing was strictly forbidden I was stoked at how the shot came out.

Stay tuned for the next installment on the blog, I'm off to the spectacular Cinque Terra in Italy on Tuesday so I'm sure to get some nice images there, even if the weather is forecasting rain pretty much every day. As always feel free to leave a comment if you've managed to get to the end!

Lazy London Weekend

2008-05-13T21:52:00.001+01:00

I think it's been 2 weeks since my last update, I did actually head to Borough Markets on the weekend before last and managed to get a few shots, but I think I'll save those for a rainy day and instead talk about the weekend just passed. On Saturday I headed out to Richmond Park on the weekend to take advantage of the sunshine. Armed only with my 18-200 super zoom (decided it was overkill taking my big boys along for a lazy picnic where there was no guarantee the camera would even find its way out of the bag) I set about seeing what what I could conjure up.

I thought this first photo summed the day up quite nicely. I tried to just go for a very simple shot with a dynamic composition, didn't include anything unnecessary (besides that distraction in the bottom right corner), and went for a bold crop to fill the frame.

Next up we have Josh and Emma, 2 of my favourite models. Josh in particular is always jumping off stuff, climbing things and generally getting himself into photographic situations, one of these day I'm going to make an album and call it Jumping Josh, you mark my words. In this shot Emma was impressing us all with her fleibility, so Josh, not to be outdone, decided to impress us with his athletecism by fly kicking over her. I, of course, was there to document it for the ages.

Seems I'm not the only one who likes taking photos of Josh

To finish things up I'll bring you a collection of tree related portraits. In our fruitless pursuit of deer we decided to take a rest on a log which happened to be lying on the ground. There was a hole in the log which I thought would make a nice frame for a portrait, after my first attempt I insisted everyone there line up and have their portrait done in the same style. People think I'm weird.

Josh in a tree. The lighting was a little tricky here as there were light patches and dark patches. I made Josh look directly in to the sun (no complaints, another reason he's a favourite model!) to make sure his face was well lit and snapped away.

And finally a double tree portrait. Em had had a few wines in the sunshine and was keen to climb as high up the tree as possible, Sensible Simon vetoed the idea on the grounds that he didn't want to have to call an ambulance. In the end it worked out Nicely with Em in the foreground and Josh a slightly blurred monkey in the background. Had 3 shots of this scene that I liked, tough to pick just one but I'll go with this one.

Finally let me experiment with this Picasa slideshow they're touting, let's see if it works......

Live East, Die Young

2008-04-28T20:24:00.000+01:00

I received an unusual email request recently from a friend in Australia. He wanted me to hunt down and photograph a piece of graffiti which read "You are not how much money you have in the bank" for a project he was doing on profound graffiti works. I had a street name to work with and that was all.

As luck would have it the sun came out properly for the first time all year on Saturday, so in the late afternoon light I donned my shorts and T-shirt, grabbed my camera (with my 24-70 lens attached) and headed East to Brick Lane and surrounding gritty areas in pursuit of some graf. This is one of the things I love most about photography, it gets you out of the house and forces you to see interesting things and interact with unusual people that you wouldn't get the chance to see and meet if you'd stayed on the couch. And if you're after interesting looking people in London I'd suggest East London is second only to Camden in this department.

This first shot was taken on Shoreditch High Street, I was feverishly looking around for some interesting shapes with interesting light bouncing off them when I stumbled upon this fence. I took a few shots of just the fence but they lacked punch, when I deceided to fill half the frame and have a blurred walking figure in the other half I liked the look if it a lot more, the shot had a degree of interest to it. Only problem is I think I was a little close to the first post and it's not quite pin sharp, and the rest of the shot is intentionally out of focus, so I've basically taken a shot with nothing in focus. I guess that makes me arty.

Next up we have my attempt at classic Brick Lane shot. As I was walking down the street towards Brick Lane I spotted the street sign and thought that would make a nice image, the light was good too. Problem was I was too far away so I had to wait till I was closer. As I got a little closer (not yet close enough) a musician with a guitar case stepped right into my frame, a perfect point of interest. I whipped out the camera but was still a bit far from the action to make it work (only had the one lens which only went to 70) so a hastily semi-jogged to get myself in a better spot. Miraculously this guitar carrying muzak creator continued to dawdle right in the very sport I wanted him to for a good 30 seconds more, then when I saw the crazy old guy with dreads approaching on a bike from my right I though all my Christmases had come at once. I waited for the right moment and pulled the trigger, and after a little cropping in Lightroom to get the framing spot on I converted to B & W and proceeded to write about it on my blog.

I frequently treat myself to a Subway sandwich on Sundays (chicken and bacon ranch on Italian herbs and cheese, toasted with cheese), opposite the sandwich factory sits a burned out shell of a building that I always think would make a good photo. My trip back from the Lane took me past this shell so I thought I'd make good on my promise to myself and set up camp on the other side of the road and wait for someone to walk past. A photo of the building alone is ok, but really lacks something, especially when taken from a conventional bang-in-front position, however a photo taken at a slower shutter speed (1/30 of a second) with a member of the public walking past transmorphs an average photo into something far more appealing to the eye. I also thought this lady's somewhat corporate appearance contrasted nicely against the ruin behind her, I would like to suggest that this is my take on the credit crunch and the impending doom in the global financial markets - but I've only just thought of that now so i can't really claim it as my motivation.

I never was able to find the piece of graffiti I went in search of, but the enjoyment I found from a few hours in the sun with my favourite toy was a much better find.

My Sordid Past

2008-04-21T21:24:00.000+01:00

As I've not managed to get out there with the camera this week I've decided to take up a suggestion (thanks Hebrew Hustle) to document my progression as a budding photographer. This was a particularly welcome suggestion for 2 reasons:
1. I didn't have to do anything new
2. It allowed me to be a bit self indulgant under the guise of responding to a suggestion, but at the end of the day this whole blog's a bit self indulgent isn't it? (although it's a rhetorical question feel free to answer it in the comments at the bottom!)

So, I thought I'd run you through my favourite photos from my first digital camera, the then "ultra slim" Pentax Optio 330GS.

I purchased this little number back in 2003 to take with me on my world safari. I was looking at 2 megapixel cameras back then, but decided to splash out for the more impressive 3 megapixel option, and to record these images I went for 2 x 128mb memory cards. All up the whole kit cost me somewhere in the AU$800 vicinity, quite a preposterous amount by today's standards. So, here it is, the very first photo I ever took with a digital camera, a delightful self portrait I think you'll agree.

Next up we've got a night shot I took in Hong Kong a few weeks after buying the camera. In the absence of a tripod I rested it on a wall and experimented with the shutter speeds until I got the result I was after, but not really understanding anything about shutter speed at that time I think it's a miracle this one turned out as well as it did!

Next up there's 4 of my favourite shots from Spain.

And to round things out we've got a couple of my favourites from Torres Del Paine national park down in the south of Chile.

So, there you go, this is what happens when you send someone out into the great big world with a very basic camera and no technical knowledge. Shortly after those last 2 shots were taken this camera was stolen, so for the next installment of my photographic odyssey you'll see what results a hefty 4mp Canon point and shoot can deliver.

Till then.

Not A Young Man Anymore

2008-04-14T19:59:00.000+01:00

It's not so much the fact I'm now into my thirties that bothers me, it's more the fact I'm no longer in my twenties. I know they sound like exactly the same thing, and logically they have to be, but in my mind they're very different. So, it was with this last hurrah mentality that I headed down to Brighton on the weekend with 15 of my nearest and dearest to see in this next decade in style.

To provide a bit of light entertainment I decided to organise a photo treasure hunt loosely based on the Shoot Portobello from the previous week (see last blog entry), and by loosely based I mean borderline identical. So, Snap Brighton was a whirlwind 5 clue 2 hour event which culminated in a slide show and awards ceremony at the end, congrats to Shane & Sherrie on their winning photo, I trust you enjoyed the 2 litre bottle of Strongbow. While the others were out shooting clues I decided to try my hand as a paparazzi/private detective by sneaking round after the competitors and getting images of them in compromising positions. I decided to give up on this after I lost the scent of my first targets after 3 minutes and couldn't find anyone else and instead just pottered round Brighton looking for images. I decided to stick with the 70-200 lens the whole time to try and force me to look at things in a different way.

This first shot is perhaps my favourite from the weekend. I stumbled across this amazing band of buskers performing in a park, they were playing Buena Vista Social Club style music and the crowd was loving it. A young girl in the crowd was clearly enamored with the tuba player, an uber cool black guy, and after they finished one of their tracks she bounded right up to him for a chat. I managed to capture that moment with this shot, the downside was that I cropped off the top of his tube and his head is touching the top of the frame which sort of ruins the aesthetics of the image. Still though, I really like it.

As Brighton is a seaside town there were loads of seagull everywhere. I went on a bit of a gull shooting bonanza as the nice light, lovely blue skies and my telephoto lens were all working nicely in my favour. Managed to capture this first guy looking straight down the lens, it's always good to get wild animals to pose for your images. The second one was easier to take than you might think, due to the wind drafts the gulls were literally suspended in mid air with minimal movement, I set the focus to AI Servo to track any movement that did occur and filled the frame with gull wings.

This third gull related shot was taken to show 2 things, firstly the number of gulls all over the place, but secondly the amazing changing weather, this was a huge storm cloud sweeping in over the ocean. I just love how there's absolutely zero barrel or pincushion distortion when you shoot with L series lenses, the horizon is just perfect.

Another shot I like, I think this one works because the 3 models are all doing something different, if I just had 3 people all standing next to each other at roughly the same height the shot would look a bit boring and stagnant but luckily Dave had his legs spread and Siobhan was sitting down so it all came together nicely.

The classic sunglasses reflection shot, not highly original but I still like it.

Lastly I thought I should include one of the Brighton Pier itself. I spotted this shot potential early on the first day but it wasn't till late on the final day that I managed to be in the right place while kids were using those jumpy things (which look really fun BTW, anyone ever been on one?).

Well, harder than I thought to come up with a short selection of shots, still not sure if I've picked the best ones, click on any of the images to take you to the full album, and as always, feel free to leave a comment.

Another Glorious Victory

2008-04-05T11:13:00.000+01:00

What's this, a Blog update on a Saturday? Yeah, that's right, just another example of my unconventional approach to photography and my total disregard for society's conventions.

I write this 7 days after another fantastic photographic treasure hunt, this time round it was Shoot Portobello. This is the third such event that my cohorts and I have been involved with and somehow we've managed to come away with 3 winners badges. To put this in perspective there are actually 14 of this badges per event and roughly 60 teams competing for them. I was also linked to the overall prize as a group of friends who called their team "Better Than Simon's Team" managed to win it all after Shane jumped into the canal in the name of art. Kudos.

I'll start with our winning photo. This wasn't our most aesthetically pleasing photo but I think it got the nod for being a bit clever. The event was scheduled on the same day as the famous Oxford Cambridge boat race which I otherwise would have gone to, so this was our take on that. Dave came up with the idea of doing a drinking competition style boat race and went the extra mile to pour beer over his head for the first shot of the day. It's the little touches that bring the jewelery. Clue: You can al(l) get nautical along this nearby waterway.

We were struggling to come up with something creative for this next shot. The clue was "Knotting Hill" so it was very open to interpretation. We left this clue to last and by this stage we thought we'd already taken some good shots and motivation was low. I spotted a shop selling Notting Hill bags for just £3 so I thought it might make a good shot to attach the 10-20 lens and get down low to shoot someone holding the bag while shopping. We bought a leak to have sticking out of the bag and bulked the bag up with some police hats we'd purchased as props for another clue. The light was very flat so I decided to shoot in black and white. In the end I was really pleased how the shot turned out, we sort of ignored the "k" at the start of the "knotting" in the clue but we decided to leave it as a nice artistic photo rather than add the K with a marker and cheapen the shot.

Last but not least we have my favorite shot of the day. There are strict rules in the comp about digital manipulation of photos, so I came up with an idea before the comp whereby we take a few shots related to a clue, take them to snappy snaps (locations had been researched before the day) to get them printed, then include them in the final shot. The clue was: "Waterford crystals? Napoleon's pistols? You'll find what you want in the......('Beautiful Port')....road." so that seemed perfect. Here's what we came up with.

So, as I said at the top, 3 on the trot...