Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 100mm f2.8 @ 100mm / f11
Lighting: Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with White Backdrop

View on Flickr

Technical Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: EF 24 – 70mm f2.8 L @ 62mm / f8
Lighting: Sigma EF530 DG SUPER Flash / PhotoSEL LT-144 Light Tent with White Backdrop

View on Flickr

With the London Fashion Week been and gone, there was a less talked about but equally as good show called the London Fashion Weekend at Somerset House.

This was the first time I have ever been to anything like London Fashion Weekend, but this was too good an opportunity to miss! And this is why:

Over the last few years I’ve gone to quite a lot of indoor events at quite a few venues and nearly all of them have one thing in common: VERY poor lighting and VERY poor when it comes to giving photographers the opportunity & access to get good shots. Usually there are no photographer tickets allowing you to get a bit closer, no way to get a press-pass unless you’re there working for a specific publication, and there’s usually insufficient lighting, leaving no other option but to go there as a normal person and hope for the best.

From the Candy Rock Range

However, the London Fashion Weekend had it ALL right! First of all they offered a special Photographer ticket that allowed you to get into the photographers box right at the end of the catwalk, and in my case – smack down the middle of the catwalk!

From the Vintage Glamour Range

Secondly, the lighting was pretty amazing, coming from sparsely lit rooms to a full blown professional catwalk set-up was an extremely nice change – and it certainly shows in the photos, no more high ISO to compensate for dim lights, no more need to use a flash, just bright, nicely lit photos.

From the Candy Rock Range

Usually I’m not interested in Fashion – it’s not something that does anything for me, but I thought it would give me some practice shooting something different, after all, there’s only so many Motorshows & Motorsport events you can go to without getting bored of the same subject matter, and I really am glad that I took the opportunity.

Mecia Simson, winner of Britain’s Next Top Model 2009, in an outfit from Betty Jackon’s collection

From the Swallows & Amazons Range

All in all I would like to congratulate the organisers of the London Fashion Weekend for doing such a great job to accommodate photographers, If only more event organisers would put on such a good event for photographers, after all they want the publicity as much as anything. Good work!

You can see all of the photos in my London Fashion Weekend Photoset

On Sunday at the MCN Motorcycle Show at Excel, London, this years MCN Babe of the Year contest came to a close. Out of the 6 finalists there could only be one winner, and quite a crowd gathered to await the result. As with the past 3 years the announcement took place on the MCN Live! stage and where better to get good shots of the contestants than right at the front – even despite the myriad of obstacles blocking the way.

Georgia Graham – MCN Babe 2010

The winner of this year’s MCN Babe of the year contest was Georgia Graham who clearly was shocked at being announced the winner as of course you would be!

Georgia Graham – Reaction as she was announced the Winner!

Of course, nothing is done without motivation, in an interview with MCN Motorcycle news, Georgia said; “I was bullied as school for being ugly, so I want to prove the bullies wrong by winning” – something that she certainly has done now.

Georgia Graham – MCN Babe 2010

After being announced the winner Georgia posed for photographers with her MCN crown and outfit, something that she will now be doing quite regularly. She is now the public face of MCN Motorcycle News for 2010 and as part of winning she also won a year’s modelling contract.

MCN Babe Finalists

Runners-up Emma Watts from Leicestershire

Hayley Sams from Bedforshire

To see more photos head on over to my MCN Babe 2010 Photoset

The Autosport International Motor show at the NEC in Birmingham promised to be a fantastic opportunity to get some good shots of Cars, Celebs and Showgirls – and to a certain extent it was.

Brawn GP 2009 Car

The cars on display were a mix of old and new, from vintage F1 cars to the latest 2009 models, old and new Rally cars and even some super cars thrown in for good measure!

Brawn GP 2009 Car

Among the diverse range of cars were special appearances from Jenson Button, Martin Brundle, Alan McNish and Johnny Herbert accompanied by the inevitable crowd of fans and followers.

Showgirls

Having said that, it wasn’t all good, the “pit pass” tickets that I got were rather pointless, backstage access to the stunt show which really was a load of cars parked in a dimly lit warehouse with 6ft high fences around, and the “sideline viewing area” was no better, certainly not if you were there to take photos of the action.

Porsche Stand

With so many of us now using “Cloud” services to share and store data, one of the key things to remember is that just because it’s in the Cloud, it’s not always guaranteed to be safe. I’m not talking about the security implications of using cloud services as much as I am the possibility of the service disappearing or a massive data loss down the line that makes it almost impossible to get your data back – something that is even more important since the T-Mobile / Microsoft Sidekick fiasco a while back.

When using services like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter it can be a nightmare to get to your data, you may find individual applications that do it, but it can be a laborious task.

This is where Backupify comes in, Backupify is an easy way to backup all the popular cloud services in one place using the API’s provided by each service, simply sign up, configure the backups and Backupify will do the rest for you – all from one central location.

I was first introduced to Backupify on Net@Night where the founder Robert May was interviewed. After listening, I signed up for an account and set it up to backup Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Blog and Gmail account, the process was surprisingly easy, some of the services require you to login and authorise the Backupify service, others require you to enter your user name and password, but I had it all set-up within about 5 minutes.

The best part about Backupify is that until the 31st January 2010 you can sign up for a FREE account, after this time there will still be a free account but it will have limitations unless you pay for a premium account. Personally I recommend signing up now and setting it up – just in case!