The weekend has been disappointing weather-wise and as a result my plans have all been scrapped. My intention was to visit Goodwood yesterday for my first visit to the Vintage Fly-In but due to the forecasts and the dingy start to the day I made other plans. By the time I realised that things were going against the forecast and the sun was coming out it was too late to change my mind and head along to Goodwood.

Based on some shots I have seen online it looks like the weather turned out as nicely as it did in Eastbourne and some good photographs were available. Today’s event has been cancelled due to the heavy overnight rains which caused localised flooding.

The plan for today had been to head to Brands Hatch for the Historic Masters Festival, but again the weather in the morning put me off. Last year the rain caused major racing delays at Brands and I was not eager to repeat the experience. While it’s now dry in Eastbourne there’s very little light so photography I’m sure would still be challenging.

Yesterday we had a very heavy downpour of snow for most of the day and for the first time in ages it settled properly across the county. Rhiannon and I waited until the snow was nice and thick before heading out to capture some of the snow coated Sussex scenery.

Due to the in some places very severe driving conditions we didn’t venture to as many locations as planned and the first place on the light took a lot longer to walk to than anticipated. The upshot was that by the time we’d got back to the car we were cold and tired so returned home with only a few select shots from the day.

The location we did achieve was up to the cottages that overlook the mouth of the River Cuckmere and Seven Sisters cliffs. This is a much photographed scene in the summer but I haven’t seen any wintery shots of it. We took the path that follows the river, which turned out to be longer than I remembered and a bit tricky in places due to the snow and ice. I managed to slip once before righting myself, only to slip a second time in the same spot. No harm done except for some muddy and damp trousers!

The walk was worth it as once we did reach the cottages the view was quite unique. Although the cliffs were starting to disappear into the mist I was pleased with the scene and took a few shots using the 17-40 lens. We spent perhaps 10 minutes at the top of the cliff before the bitter wind and dampening equipment drove us away. I finished my shoot with an eight shot panorama that turned out pretty well. It needs some refined processing to tidy it up before I add it to the gallery.

Here’s a couple of shots from the snowy cliff top…

I’m still being quite bad at keeping this blog updated which is really down to the lack of free time I have at the moment. The past two weekends I was at motorsport events and the evenings have been filled with processing the shots and trying to push forward with the new website.

Equipment

I went a bit extravagant this month and purchased a second hand Canon 1D MkIIN. This is part of Canon professional range of camera bodies and is a widely used camera for sports photographers around the world. While the 20D is a great piece of kit and still has a place in my camera bag, the MkIIN is a significant upgrade in terms of speed, performance, flexibility and build.

Photography

At the beginning of November I spent the day at Brands Hatch for the British Truck Racing Association meeting. As always the trucks were great entertainment and it was a chance for me to use my new ID MkIIN for the first time. The results were very impressive and while I still need practice I came away from the day very happy with my purchase.

Truck Racing Gallery

This past weekend I was encouraged to join some friends at the South of England Tempest Rally in Hampshire. An early start was required to arrive at the Yateley stage for our 8:30 meeting time. We spent the whole day on this stage watching both the 2 and 4 wheel drives groups making their way through the forest. The light was very tricky and high ISO’s were required for the whole day in order to get reasonable shutter speeds. I was quite happy with the results and pleased to try out the MkIIN in low light conditions. High ISO noise does seem better than on the 20D.

Tempest Rally Gallery

Website Development

Development continues on the website and some of the main elements are nearing completion. The gallery system is coming together nicely as is the updated blog engine. I’m hoping to get to a point soon where I can think about releasing the new site to the public. It won’t have all of the new features I planned but will be a big improvement. I’m hoping that there may be a chance I can get the release of 2.0 out very early in 2008.

It's been ages since I've last updated the blog and the website in general and so this first sentence should really be an apology. I've recently completed a rather large order or prints for a local company which has taken up much of my free time for the past couple of weeks. I was commissioned to photograph some "staff in action" shots for display on the walls around the building, as well as providing a number of local landscape photographs to brighten the place up and give visiting customers a sense of the area.

My favourite item was a large 1m acrylic landscape which has turned out very nicely indeed. They are quite expensive to produce but look very professional on the wall. The acrylic is now hung in the lecture room and looks fantastic. I'll be adding prices for the acrylics to my new version of the website.

Work on the next version of the website has been stalled a bit as well but I plan to pick that up again when time permits. I'd like to get it online as soon as possible because it will make uploading new photographs much quicker and therefore mean the site gets updated more often.

This weekend I am planning a much needed return to motorsports photography with a VSCC event at Goodwood. It should be a relaxing day due to the lack of fences and hopefully the clear skies will stay with us until then. In November I have the truck racing at Brands Hatch and possibility of attending the Tempest Rally.

With many days of airshows completed this year and potentially a couple more left at Shoreham later in the month I have built up a huge collection of photographs from the events. I haven’t counted but I expect there are about 2500-3000 photographs from this year’s airshows on my computer currently. They are all in RAW format so they take up a nice chunk of hard disk space and have to be processed to produce the JPEG required for web display.

The RAW choice was a conscious decision and while more time consuming to work with I prefer the latitude the format gives me for making exposure adjustments after the event with less negative effects than trying to make the changes to the JPEG files. It also future proofs the files a little because it means as new software is released and I learn new techniques I have an untouched file to work with to re-process the shot to get the best possible image.

I’m trying to get through the processing as fast as possible in the evenings and weekends I have free, but with events most weekends during the summer and other priorities in the evenings time is short. I have recently made the decision to spend less time on the JPEG (web ready) preparation of my photographs and now only perform more basic processing and adjustments to try and limit the time spent on the files. It still can mean 3-5 minutes per photograph which can quickly consume the free time I have.

It is very likely that the winter will be the best time to catch up on some of my backlog as with dark evenings and miserable weekend weather (not a huge change from this summer!) I should have more time to spend in front of the computer getting the files processed. It is my hope to get my new website online before too long which will make the upload process for the photographs easier as well.

This week I’m making a big effort to get a collection of photographs from each of the airshow online. I’ve started working through my most recent outing at Lydd and will also be concentrating on RIAT and Airbourne photographs. I haven’t had time to put in proper links on my main website to the galleries but check out http://www.sjgevents.fotopic.net for all of my airshow photographs processed so far.

Once again I seem to have fallen into the trap of blogging and have neglected my updates for a while. In part this is because I have been busy with work and other things so photography has taken a back seat for a bit. However with the extra light at the end of the day and the upcoming bank holiday I hope to get out and take some photographs quite soon and perhaps even find the time to process some of them and upload them to the site!

At the weekend I did make a brief return to the camera, mainly to play some more with my new 17-40mm lens. I must say I am pretty happy with the results. The shots are quite a bit sharper than the 17-85mm manages, although not quite as good as the 50mm 1.4 which I think will still see a lot of use. The contrast of the 17-40mm is pretty punchy when compared to the 17-85mm with the colours (reds in particular) seem more saturated. I've found I tend to need to increase the exposure by about 1 third of a step when using the 17-40mm as otherwise the shots tend towards being a little underexposed.

The one aspect of the 17-40mm I'm not so happy with is the level of distortion at the 17mm end. I need to do a proper comparison but it seems that the sides of the shot pull in the verticals more than on the 17-85mm. Obviously some effect is expected at such a wide angle but it has affected a few of my architectural shots or landscapes with verticals on the horizon.

The motorsport circuit season is now getting off to a start with a few events already having taken place. One of the main ones for me is the A1GP at Brands Hatch at the end of the month. I'm currently contemplating a two day visit. Saturday will be for photography and Sunday to enjoy the racing. I'm hoping the traffic situation on exiting will be better than last year as it was pretty awful. It took us 3 hours just to make a move towards the M25!

I'm not yet sure what else I will be attending this month. There's a hill climb at Gurston Down on the 21st and 22nd which I may trek over to. It's a long way but always an enjoyable and relaxed day. That one may be dependant on reasonably decent weather.

I'm using up my remaining holiday this month and taking Thursday through to the following Friday off work. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for decent weather and a chance to do some local photography as well as visiting a few other places a bit further away.

I forgot to mention last week that I was heading to London for 5 days to complete some Microsoft Exchange training for my MCSE. It's the last course I need to do to prepare me for my final exam so I'm feeling glad to be near the end!

I still have access to my emails so you can get in touch with me via the contact page. I'll be back on Friday evening and over the weekend will try to fit in some more processing from Brooklands if I have the time and energy.

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish all my visitors a very happy new year. 2006 was a good year but a busy one. I managed to get to quite a lot of the events I'd hoped to but did find the post processing a bit daunting. A nice end to the year was having one of my photographs used on the cover of 'Cats Whiskers' Sunbeam Tiger's Owners Club magazine. The shot was taken at the 2006 Goodwood Revival during the Mod's and Rockers parade.



I all ready have started adding dates to my diary for the 2007 events, with my first one coming up this month. For the second year running I will be visiting Brooklands museum for the New Year's driving tests held by the VSCC on the 14th January. Last year was my first time as Brooklands and I enjoyed the unique day out with a chance to photograph some very interesting cars. It's a nice way to ease back into motorsports photography with plenty of freedom to play with angles.

Over the Christmas break I completed my first attempt at a Photoshop video tutorial. I need to do some editing and screen it for my test audience but I hope to have it available for download soon. My only issue will be how much of my allocated monthly bandwidth it eats into!

Also over the break I upgraded my PC with some additional storage and starting work on a new image filing structure and naming convention. I added a new 320Gb Internal SATA drive which is now dedicated to photographic storage and also purchased a 250Gb USB 2.0 external drive to use as my first line of data backup. I was very slack with backing up photographs in 2006 which is something I definitely need to change. I will now backup to the external drive and also to DVD for offsite storage. Once my new file naming convention is implemented this process should be a lot easier and tracking images will be much less complicated.