Sheep and dogs and stuff

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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!