Barkston Heath 'The same but different'

Back at the begining of August Antonella and I went to RAF Barkston Heath to photograph a round of the Toyota Sprint Series for Andrew Cliffe as he'd found himself double booked.

Earlier this month I blogged about the images from the day that had been published by Banzai magazine and yesterday I heard that MR2 Only Magazine (subtitled No Scoobies, Evo's GTO's or FTO's... MR2s only) had published 5 of our images

The title Same But Different comes from the fact that the track is normally used clockwise but occasionally they spice things up a little by running the otherway around

For those of you that don't know of this hidden away venue it has an interesting history as it was home to part of the Bloodhound missile defence system after it was reployed from Germany in the early 1980's. The missiles remained at Barkston Heath until 1991 leaving only some rather odd concrete structures that formed the bases for the launch platforms.

They would certainly have given these MR2's a run for their money as apparently it was a rather rapid piece of kit

"By the time the missile has just cleared the launcher it is doing 400 mph. By the time the missile is 25 feet from the launcher it has reached the speed of sound (around 720 mph). Three seconds after launch, as the four boost rockets fall away, it has reached Mach 2.5 which is roughly 1800 mph"

I heard on the radio that Gordon Brown said that there was no Plan B

Just as well that I have made my Plan B into my Plan A I thought to myself if this shower have decided to ban everyone's Plan B

Oh wait a minute, he was talking about climate change (Telegraph Website) - it's all part of trying to hold onto his place on the world stage by his finger tips

When I blogged the story of the 13'6" truck and the 13' bridge in Hitchin last week I thought that the story would have missed the copy deadline for the print edition of the paper

Happily I was wrong and a short version of the story together with one of my pictures was published last Thursday.

It's kinda nice having a picture credit

A recent portrait shoot of 3 brothers

The time is flying by and it has been over a week since I last blogged - oops

I recently did a quick portrait shoot of Tom, Guy & Harry in Letchworth (those of you who know me will no doubt recognise them)

We started off in Granny's garden and then moved to the fountain in Broadway Gardens in the centre of Letchworth. This fountain was created for the millenium and is about half a mile from the world's 1st roundabout

Calumet and why A 13'6" truck will not fit under a 13' bridge

I went down to London this morning to the 70th birthday Open Day at Calumet, lots of very tempting things to play with including a rather spendy Hasselblad and some covetable Bowens portable strobe units

I comforted myself by buying a small stash of replacement modelling light bulbs for my current studio lights - I'd not noticed before that they do some ordinary ones at less at £2 each or some special long lasting ones for over £20 - will they really last 10 times longer ? I dont expect so in real use so I went for the cheap ones.

One the train on the way home just before Hitchin station I noticed that an express train on the adjacent fast line had slowed right down and was crawling along at the same speed as my train to the extent that I could pick up their wifi (thanks National Express trains).

The reason for this slow time became apparent when I walked out of Hitchin station to see that a container truck that was too tall had tried to go under the Cambridge Road bridge which carried the East Coast Mainline and had no doubt stopped very rapidly when the container hit the huge steel girder placed a few feet in front of the bridge to protect it in this very eventuality. This sudden stop also resulted in an  innocent van driver having a rather stoved in vehicle that would need a great deal of work with T-cut to restore

I took a couple of iPhone pics but decided to rush home and back to get a proper camera

Back on the scene tt took about an hour for the breakdown truck to arrive to take the van away and then the truck was reversed away from the bridge and went on its merry way to find a bridge of its own size to pick on.

When I got home again I quickly selected a handful of images, converted them to jpgs and then into newspaper sized images and fired them off to my local Archant paper The Comet

A few hours later and 3 (inc the story link on the front page) had been publisged on the Comet Newspaper online edition. I think this has missed the deadline for the print edition and by next week this will have been old news but it is nice to get a picture credit

A few images below

To do lists and teaser image of Drop Dead Dorothy

I started the day with a very long to-do list and I have ended the working day with the an even longer list that contained everything that it did at 08:00


A quick trip down to the supermarket has ticked off one item in that I now have some folders so I can do some more filing (questionable how quickly I will actually do the filing) and so I must tick off something else before I am overcome with the guilt of being busy all day but not being any further forward, hence this posting


So here is a first teaser image from the gig shoot that Antonella and I were the photographers at last week

Here is Ashley Barber of Drop Dead Dorothy performing at the B2 Venue  in Norwich - see I told you before the light was "challenging" - I hope you had a good birthday Ashley

I will post some further images of Drop Dead Dorothy and the other 2 bands Thick Trick Chloe and Dying Breed very soon

All around the twisty bits

A very brief posting,  Antonella and I were very pleased to recently hear that some of our images from the Barkston Heath Toyota Sprint Series meeting had been published (albeit without photo credits) in Banzai magazine. Our images are the 5 at the bottom of this double page spread. This is the first time that we've had images published in a fully commercial magazine

It also reminds me that I have got to find a better blog edit system as the photo handling in blogger stinks

Still busy busy

I'm having such a busy time, I dont know how I found the time to go to work ;-)

Last Thursday I attended a workshop on running a photographic business - The worshop was useful as it did serve to reinforce the fact that I am way ahead of others starting out as a photographer so the last 12 months of research & preparation may be paying off

Then it was off to Norfolk, first photographic stop was the hotel & golf course where we are shooting a wedding in October (more of this later), it is a lovely venue with plenty of locations for ad-hoc formals.

Then I was able to assist Antonella with another photoshoot for a model portfolio, again we were shooting the lovely Justine and despite the gale force winds Antonella captured some absolutely fantastic images.

Then we were back in Norwich on Tuesday to meet the bride & groom for the October wedding, from their description it is certainly going to be a theatrical wedding (they are both in the music industry) with some very novel forms of entertainment but ..................

.....they then dropped something of a bombshell on the table. At this stage we cant give any more details for reasons that will become apparent but the streets of Norwich were resounding with a few "whoo hoooos" as we walked back to the carpark

Not too much to think about it as we had another engagement shooting a gig at a local music venue. I really should have used some ear plugs but we both managed to get some great images despite the "interesting" light (or lack of it)

I have quite back log of images to blog too including the ones I took when I was a second shooter for tpphotography down in the New Forest so there should be another blog posting shortly