Electric Pig » Photography

Carnival 2010

Electric Pig — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:31:20 +0000

These are some photos from this year’s Notting Hill Carnival. It was as fun as ever this year, although as it rained on the Sunday for a (pretty short) period, the Monday was properly rammed, possibly more so than in the past couple of years. I thought it felt a little bit safer than last year, and the only trouble we saw was (surprise, surprise), at the D&B stage. Some young bloke started getting pretty aggressive with a lot of the people nearby him, typically just as we were walking past. One of the MCs onstage managed to stop the music and started screaming at him. She was properly angry, and had a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude about her that would brook no argument. She sounded like an mother whose children had tried it on one too many times. In the end, she could the whole crowd screaming “out, out, out”, at him, until he was manhandled away from the crowd round a corner, out of sight, out of mind. It was a pretty impressive display! These photos are mainly from the roads around All Saints Road and Westbourne Park Road. I shot them again with some Fuji Velvia in the T2. I still like the results, but Carnival isn’t the easiest place to shoot, and it shows. Click them to see extra bigness.

Velvia a Paris

Electric Pig — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:36:03 +0000

A few months back I found an old expired roll of Velvia 100 slide film in the back of my photo drawer. For some reason, I’d never tried slide film in my T2 so thought I might as well give it a go. These are the results. They’re mostly from when Eri & I went to Paris a month or so ago, although a couple are from London. I really like the high contrast feel in these – really works well for Paris. I can imagine that the saturation would be far too strong for a lot of subjects, but it makes for a nice change from the films I’ve been using in the T2 recently. I wish I knew some shops near me which actually had a decent selection of film so I could buy some more – guess it’s going to have to be eBay again, if I can work out how to actually win an auction. Click the photos below for biggerness.

Shura @ Archway

Electric Pig — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:52:56 +0000

I went to one of my lil’sister’s gigs this week, somewhere in Archway, deepest, darkest Norf London. Shu plays guitar and sampler and sings her own songs, accompanied by a boy with the curliest hair since Keegan’s 70′s mop (been watching too much World Cup recently). She can be found on the web here and here. The gig was good, Shu sung well and was well received I thought, with just some work needing doing on the time she takes with initial looping. I must add that the guy who started off the night, whose name I believe was Craig Ingham, had some of the best patter between songs I have ever heard. Much better than the usual thanks and introduction to the band that we got when I was young…

I wanted to try to take some photos at the gig, partly for Shu’s prospective website, and partly just for photo practice. It turned out to be quite a good venue for photos, as I had a decent sized seat and a little table in front to hold my bag. I found I could just about get away with a couple of shots at 200ISO, but most of the shots are at 400 or 800 ISO. I had better focus with the 50mm at f1.8 than I had had last time I had tried to shoot any shots of one of her gigs, with slightly less blur, but it still wasn’t great. I took far more shots this time though, so there was bound to be some degree of sheer quantity of shots yielding slightly more good ones. There wasn’t really room to move around when the music had actually started though, hence the similar angle for most of them. Sorry about that. There’s some more below. Click to see them bigger.

Tunnel Vision

Electric Pig — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:19:26 +0000

First shot with my new camera. There’s obviously some kind of light-leaking problem on the left hand side, but apparantly it’s pretty common, something to do with the foam under the darkslide that needs to be replaced, which I should be able to do myself if I can find the parts. Hopefully have it done before I go to Japan in a few weeks…

He Flies!

Electric Pig — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:23:26 +0000

Texture

Electric Pig — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 11:52:41 +0000

Deer Park & Isabella Plantations

Electric Pig — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:15:40 +0000

Click to see bigger versions!

Flickr Favourites: July 2009

Electric Pig — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:37:30 +0000

I haven’t done one of these for a while, partly as I haven’t been going in depth into Flickr too much recently. But anyway, here are my most recent favourites. I think my favourite of these has to be this one from a team of Spanish students who designed and built a weather balloon and camera combo, sent it off into the atmosphere and then retrieve the camera and develop the shots. It’s a beautiful, beautiful shot!

Stationeri

Electric Pig — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:44:55 +0000

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

This is a little experiment me and Eri did while I was in Japan. The lights presumably strobe in real life too, but I never really pay attention or my brain compensates or something, but here it’s pretty noticeable, which I quite like. Eri did a pretty good job of staying still too!

Shu

Electric Pig — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:01:55 +0000

From my lil’Sis’ gig in Notting Hill. Unfortunately shot at 1600 ISO thanks to the low light and then worked on in PS. She was very good.