Payday came around again (hurrah!), but this time I decided to make my final great-big-purchase of this 12-month job. It’s my first one since graduating (technically still a student, actually), and while I have the benefits of an interest-free overdraft to dip into when I need to, I figured I could probably treat myself.

And boy, did I treat myself.

It’s been out for long enough now that I don’t need to explain what a great camera the 5D Mark II is. One thing I will say is that I find the camera tends to underexpose in its metering, which is a bit annoying but not a massive problem. (I’d rather bring up the exposure in post rather than trying to cope with loads of blown-out highlights.) Of course, that could be a ‘problem’ with either the camera’s LCD (which automatically adjusts its brightness level dependent on ambient light), or my (forgive me – uncalibrated!) iMac display.

Even more luckily for me, this month I’m heading to both France and Scotland for holidays, so I’ll have plenty of time to put it through its paces.

Since the usual guy was stuck doing the lighting (very well, I might add – if a little high-contrast for my taste!), I was asked to step in and shoot the annual UCOpera during its dress rehearsal last weekend.

Aside from enjoying myself by being able to listen to an opera while I worked, the production itself was fun to shoot. Although being a dress rehearsal there were still a couple of lighting issues (in the wrong place, not bright enough and so on!), there were quite a few scenes involving characters in one part of the stage being watched by characters in another – and with a 70-200mm f/2.8, this gives you a good opportunity to play around with what’s in focus and what’s not. Although this shot here has the main action in focus, I took a couple where this was reversed,  which worked well.

You can see more in this Flickr set – there’s not many, but I think they offer a good selection of what was on offer.

Yes, the best camera is the one most readily available (trying to avoid use of the trademarked phrase!), but it’s no use if it’s not easy to use, pleasing to use and produces decent results.

I’ve seen a lot of pics recently from @Documentally on twitter, and they all have something of a really interesting feel to them compared to the bog-standard shots I get from my iPhone, and of course it turns out he’s using a funky app to produce them. Not one with ‘recipes’ and an ‘ecosystem’ behind it designed to self-promote an already highly-promoted professional photographer, but an app designed simply to simulate an old bit of kit.

Hipstamatic is awesome. It’s not quite as fast on my iPhone 3G as the demo suggests, but it’s still fun to use and produces some cool results, like this shot of a 393 bus opposite Sainsbury’s in Camden. It’s not a technically brilliant shot – there’s camera shake, for a start – but it looks damned fine to me. And that’s all that matters.

Having two PPCs in one room isn’t particularly remarkable, especially as we draw ever closer to the much-expected May 6th general election date, but when one of them is the drummer from Blur, and the other has been described as ‘Britain’s Obama’, it becomes something a little more interesting.

This wasn’t the first time I’d come across Chuka Umunna, the Labour PPC for Streatham, and I doubt it’ll be the last, as he’s asked me several times recently to do some photography for him, but this time he had Dave Rowntree with him – who’s the Labour PPC in Westminster.

Both seem equally passionate about Labour, but Chuka comes across as – not unsurprisingly – more of a politician. Rowntree struck me as much more subdued (perhaps because he knows how hard it would be to win in his chosen constituency!), taking some time to become animated and engage with the audience as naturally as Chuka seems to.

The talk itself was interesting – taking place over lunchtime it was short, but the small lecture theatre made it something of an intimate setting. Both talked about their view of politics briefly, before spending the rest of the hour taking questions. Entertaining, informative and a britpop star. What more could you want from a Wednesday lunchtime?

Anyway, you can find more photos from the event in this Flickr set.

(The title of the post comes from the awful pun Chuka made in reply to one of Rowntree’s comments…)

Even though the UCLU Modo fashion society faced quite a few setbacks this year – their traditional venue within UCL was unavailable except at reading week, when no one would be around, and alternative venues were both ridiculously expensive and available for just one night, rather than their usual two, they pulled ‘The Green Fashion Show’ off spectacularly.

The Russell Hotel was a quite brilliant venue, and (from my point of view) the lighting was much better this year. Well, I say much better – I really mean there was some improvement. There was still a massive dark spot halfway down the runway, which happened to coincide with exactly where the models had been instructed to stop and pose… Luckily, the end of the runway was pretty well lit, and my new Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 wasn’t exactly unhelpful.

Unfortunately the for-one-night-only show this year meant I couldn’t cover both backstage and the runway, although I managed a few shots of models dressing and being made-up before the show started. Nor this year – it being a Sunday, when I was editing a whole bunch of shots from Celebrating Streatham – could I get a timelapse done of the set-up: being in an external venue for just one day meant a 6am start for the crew, and probably a similar finish the next morning!

I’ll get a gallery up when I’m not quite so busy – for now, this shot should suffice to illustrate what in the end was the best Modo show I’ve seen over the past four years.

I noticed the other day a post about the ‘rule’ that you shouldn’t decapitate or amputate people in photographs. Needless to say, the post went on to say that actually, doing just that could be perfectly acceptable. Not much of a rule, is it? Don’t get me started on the ‘rule of thirds’ – another one you can choose to break, for aesthetic effect.

Of course, you should never under- or over-expose your shots, unless it looks good.

And always – always! – focus on the eyes in a portrait…

The thing is, there’s no such things as rules when we’re talking about photography (or indeed any other creative pursuit – poetry, painting or piano playing). There’s some guidelines to make casual shots at least half-decent, like the ‘don’t decapitate’ rule, or the rule of thirds. Following these will give you, I’m sure, perfectly acceptable shots. But it doesn’t mean that anything else won’t be just as decent. You might have to practice a little more to get rule-breaking shots that work, but then how are you going to develop your own style unless you do what you think looks good, and not what someone has told you is a rule?

All these ‘rules’ are nothing more than tips, starting points and suggestions. Calling them rules gives them, in my opinion, too much weight, and they’ll be understood by some to be actual rules.

The only caveat I would make, however, is this: whether you choose to follow ‘rules’ or follow your gut feeling when it comes to taking a shot (and editing/developing it, of course), do what you’re doing for a reason. Don’t bounce the flash because someone told you, but because you want that quality of light. Don’t underexpose because you don’t understand how to use your camera properly, but because you want to. That’s all I ask: be deliberate.

The only rule there should be in photography is that HDR is rubbish…

Image: I figured since this post was a reflection on photography itself, we could do with a tree reflected in water. Bit lame, but there you go…!

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I hadn’t quite realised just how magical light can be at certain times of the day. I’ve always heard advice that ‘the best time to shoot’ is around sunrise and sunset, but never really realised just how good they could be until yesterday.

I’ve shot sunrise before, but that was sunrise itself, rather than anything else. And, having spent the last three years as a student, by which I mean ‘quite unlikely to be up at such an hour as to stand a reasonable chance of catching sunrise, unless he’s still on the way home from the night before’, sunrise hasn’t been the easiest of things to catch – and when it’s time for sunset, well, quite frankly drinking has been more of a pressing concern!

However, seeing the light catch on my sister’s face through the trees as we walked down a wooded path, I made her stop and walk back a few steps  (and then forward a couple, and then back one, and then forward half a step!) to get the perfect spot.

Of course, you can fiddle around with white balances and saturation and all that jazz – and just a little tweaking may have happened here – but you can’t beat the natural quality of the light, the long shadows, and of course the smug feeling that you’ve not cheated!

Boxing Day in my house is the day of the traditional family walk – we take the dogs, anyone who has been foolish enough to join us for the holidays, and head to the beach.

Being the middle of winter, sunset is very early, and luckily this year we had a clear blue sky, allowing the beautiful light of sunset to flood the scene. (My only complaint is that being on the east coast of the UK, once you descend the cliffs to the beach below, you’re stuck mostly in shadow, except at the very edge of the sea!) I must admit, until yesterday, I hadn’t quite realised just how amazing this light is -

This shot was taken quite late in the walk, once we’d come back up the cliff and the sun was almost lost, just hitting the tops of these trees.

Last night I went up to Alexandra Palace in north London for one of the city’s best displays. Because the Palace is on top of such a big hill, you get fantastic views across the city, and every now and then there’s a little burst of fireworks in the panorama in front of you, even before the main display starts. We managed to watch most of a display in Greenwich while walking back down, which puts the view into perspective.

It was a bit crowded – something like 50,000 people – and there was a bit of a mad rush after getting food and so on to get to a half decent spot, on a fairly steep slope. Luckily, with my brand spanking new Velbon Sherpa 250 tripod, this wasn’t much of an issue. I took plenty of photos during displays last year, so I wasn’t paying much attention to the camera this year, except to have a little experiment with zooming in and out during a shot at one point – you can see the half-decent result here.

Taking photos of fireworks is pretty simple, really – so long as you do have a tripod. The basics are:

• Manual settings!
• Low ISO for best colour reproduction and least noise
• Quite narrow aperture for depth of field – I was using f/11 most of the night – so it doesn’t really matter if your focusing is off.
• Long exposures. A lot of my shots were on 2.5″, although at times I went up to 15″. Try out various combinations for different effects, and find your own personal style.

I’m off to the Lord Mayor’s Fireworks on the Thames again next weekend, so expect more soon!

This is just a quick video I shot when testing the E-P1 – you should also have a read of my hands-on review. I’m not a video expert, and see few problems with the footage itself. The 14-42mm lens I was using, however, had quite  a stiff zoom ring, resulting in some jerky footage, as you’ll see. Let me know what you think!

Olympus E-P1 Test from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.