Sophie's rabbit

It would appear that Sophie's now a published illustrator!  The rabbit is going in to the Nene Park Trust newsletter too.

http://www.neneparktrust.org.uk/news-events/sophies-rabbit

Poetry from the darkside

Just an unashamed plug for my brothers excellent, but dark poetry. Checkout the link:

http://poetryfromthedarkside.blogspot.co.uk/

Or the book at Amazon:

http://tinyurl.com/pyyjv3k

Top of the world, well England anyway!

On holiday in the Lake District, my wife had said that she wanted to climb a mountain, so what better than Scafell Pike, the highest one in England!  Only trouble was we had to leave her at Lingmell Col, about 700 ft from the top in order that the kids and I would still have time to make it to the top and that we'd all have time to get down off the mountain in daylight.

Tornado in Peterborough

It's been a bit quiet lately, so when I noticed that Tornado was coming through Peterborough pulling the Cathedrals Express I thought I'd see if I could get a shot of it, as the line passes little more than a mile away from where we live. I decided to give an outing to a camera I hadn't used in a while, in fact the last shoot I'd done with it was for Model Rail magazine under lights. In my hurry however I failed to remember that the camera was set to the colour temperature for tungsten light and not daylight, it was only after I got back and downloaded the shots that I realised my error. So after an attempt to correct the colour balance had failed to yield satisfactory results I thought I'd try converting it to black & white, after all it was kind of the ideal subject for it. The overhead lines had to go, which made for a cleaner shot anyway and the result wasn't bad,  just glad the mistake wasn't made on a commission!

New blog

I've added another blog devoted to one of my main hobbies, collecting autographs or more accurately signatures of historical military characters, mainly from the covers of envelopes which they were obliged to sign in order to qualify for the privilege of free postage. The envelope fronts were cut out, pasted into albums and collected during the first four decades of the 19th century in particular and are commonly known as 'free fronts'. For anyone interested the blog which is in it's very early stages is called the 'Free Front Signature Database and can be found here: http://freefrontsignaturedatabase.blogspot.co.uk/

Small world

I was out on a shoot yesterday photographing a classic lorry at Stibbington Diner when a, shall we say, characterful man with long white hair and beard came up to me, to ask who I was doing the pictures for. "Classic & Vintage Commercials" I said, "oh" he replied, "I've got a lorry you might be interested in, it's a hedge lorry", "you mean you use it for hedge trimming, do you?" I said, "no, it's in a hedge, with a tree growing through it" he says!

That in itself might not sound that bizarre but then he writes his phone number on a UKIP flyer (in case the magazine is interested in doing a feature on him), which has his name and picture on it. It seems he's standing in the local council elections this week. Anyway when I get home from the job I discover from a UKIP flyer that he's actually my UKIP candidate!

Slide.ly of Warner Brothers Studio Tour

Warner Brothers Studio Tour from June last year, slide show put to music courtesy of Slide.ly a quick, easy and most importantly free way to compile a audio-visual. Very enjoyable day and yes, the butter beer was actually rather good!