Vintage Wings & Wheels Day 2015

Local airfield; The Fenland Aerodrome hosted a car and plane display recently. Entrance was a decent price and the weather was pretty good (in the afternoon it was anyway, I had a photo shoot in the morning and it rained!!!!!).

There were plenty of visitors on the day and as the afternoon went on and the weather got better im sure more and more arrived.

Muscle cars seemed to be a major flavour of the day as well as some vintage British cars and the odd 'one of a kinds' such as a car that appeared to have been built around a lorry cab chassis? it was massive.

As a child I loved planes and I have to admit when I hear a low flying plane I still run to the window to have a look. The planes on this day were all, what looked like to me, small private pleasure/hobby type planes that people may fly at the weekend. Sounds like a good hobby to me!

A Spitfire had a scheduled flypast; which I had to run to my car to get my DSLR and 70-200mm lens in order to shoot before it was too late, it very nearly was, if I had not run I would of missed it coming over.

On to the photos

The Bridge Hotel before its gone

Ive been major busy recently; weddings, baby's, newspapers, portraiture.

A family friend visited Wednesday and im going to be helping him with images for his website. I had a little play with a little lighting set up used for product photography, real cool, I cant wait to play with it again.

While Mark was here he left me his camera to play with; a Canon Powershot G10. In simple terms its a point and shoot camera. In more depth its a camera for enthusiasts who want to take control of the exposure settings but don't want a 'big' camera.  I looked at a similar model before I got into my Fuji cameras.

It's almost fits in the pocket, well it does as long as you have big pockets. Defo not one for skinny jeans.

The Bridge Hotel is getting demolished soon, I heard it was supposed to be a few weekends ago, that might of just been talk??? Anyway its covered in notices of demolition so I guess its really happening. Having a small camera and itching to shoot/get out of the house and enjoy the fleeting summer evening I got on my bike and took some shots of the outside. After all, ive got plenty of shots of the inside from previous explores.

Once you figure the buttons on the G10 its simple to use and fits in hand nicely, ive enjoyed using it. The image quality is not bad, could be better, I shouldn't compare image quality against a full frame Canon and a Fuji X camera its not in the same league, images do look a little noisy. Shooting at ISO 400 is rather surprisingly noisy. I don't think id like to even try ISO 800. However the smaller point and shoot nature of the camera prompted me to shoot at different angles, which again I enjoyed doing and allowed me to play with foregrounds and backgrounds in my usual tilted style.

 

 

Without a doubt my favourite image from the evening. Old phone boxes feature in everyone's memories and really are a British symbol. The layer after layer of red paint on the oldest phone boxes give them real texture. I like the play with depth and scale here; there is a large river in between the foreground and background

He just want's to go fast

It's been a while since ive written a blog post.

Ive been busy recently shooting different things for different people and ive done a couple of jobs for a local paper too, so things keep on ticking over.

Ive also spent a fair stack of money on gear recently too that should start to pop up in posts soon.

So, it was a couple of weeks ago, I was leaving my work car park when I finally noticed a snail travelling accross my windscreen. I know, I know, I should of stopped and got the little guy off but all I could think of was the Turbo film about the snail who wanted to go fast, so I took him along for the ride home.

I took it slow and I found the limits of what he could hold onto.

I have to admit I thought it was hilarious!

Good times!

I thought id take advantage of the 90mm Tamron Macro lens I have sitting gathering dust in my study. Macro is not really my thing as I hate messing around with tripods, I find it all takes too long for my liking.

So this shot was taken hand held and the focus is not quite right but what can you do.

The lens is safely back in its hiding place ready for another outing perhaps in a few months.

And Turbo; he's either living the dream after his 'live fast die young' experience or well I don't know how long a common snail lives for, maybe he died young?

Turbo!

The streets and sights of GT Yarmouth in April. Sorry Laura i didn't take any photos for the album

1st ill start by apologising to the wife;

Im sorry that I forgot to take pictures of our weekend and that I only photographed people sitting on benches.

We had a weekend away in a caravan which we have been doing for the past 5-6 years, its usually a good spring time break a couple of months before the summer holiday. We have some great memories via photographs in albums of previous weekends but not this year as I seriously didn't think about taking photos of our weekend, I just took photos of what was around me.

OOPS!

The typical clientele of sea side resorts is interesting at best, I don't know whether Yarmouth is any worse than others but if you fancy going out at night in your tracksuit and trainers then give Gt Yarmouth Tourist Board a ring and they'll hook you up quicker you can say "brand new Nike Air Max".

On the other hand I have fond memories of Yarmouth from family holidays when I was a child and teenager, my favourite was when I come in at 7am one morning as I had been out with friends at the age of about 14. I think my mum thought it was funny.

The typical clientele and the establishments present in Yarmouth can make for some great street photography; colourful 'tat' shops, fairgrounds, arcades, closed shops, decay, a timewarp!

A slave to fashion

 Seriously who buys and wears these clothes?

Want!

This guy was manning a small Art gallery down a very narrow alley, the gallery had art work on the wall, I mean the actual wall not on a canvas hanging on the wall. I asked if I could take his picture.

Parkers Donkey World; a tale of young love

Deckchairs and sea sides

The only photo of Laura from the whole weekend, OOPS!

The height of matching his and hers fashion

People watching

"dad's waiting outside"

Me

Family interest

Keep shooting street!!!

Although im now off to shoot a Flower Festival for a newspaper.....everyday is different.

Farm diversification into dereliction

Of all the things a farm could diversify into, dereliction is not recommended, especially when leaving machinery and equipment in the buildings.

As always these are buildings that I have driven past many times and for once I stopped and had a look around. Not truly a lot to see apart from the biggest of the barns/buildings that contained a production line and there was paperwork strewn all over the place dating from the 80's and 90's.

It was a good test for the x-pro as I was focusing on dark objects in the dark, not a good combination for focusing. Although it has been said that X-Pro 1 can struggle with focus, even on this occasion I still consider it an excellent performer. This was also the first time I used the 27mm f2.8 lens that I got at the same time as the camera, again its alright; a little soft but definitely usable.

It's me

 



The trusty old Golf waiting for me.

I lost my head and found it

So for my birthday Laura had a cake made for me which included a mini version of me made out of icing. I found the head quite amusing, for one I don't have curly hair!!! but I liked the beard.

I decided to carry the head around with me for a day and photograph it in different places. Im always carrying the X-Pro 1 around much like I did the Fuji X20 before it, so what's a small comedy head taking up extra space in my pocket!?

Look out

When was the last time anyone used one of these???

All images taken on the Fujifilm XF 27mm F2.8 lens.

Stay tuned.