the hunt for tony blair

I've always been a fan of the Comic Strip Presents although they are quite rare items in the schedules - I can't even remember the last one shown until last evening's Tony Blair movie.

Scripted by Peter Richardson and with Stephen Mangan (Guy from Green Wing) as Tony, this was a full on film noir classic.

There were slanted camera angles, London buses, Coppers in pairs chasing through twisting streets, pipe smoking, ordinary people in crowded London theatres and mafia leader George Bush.

Many of the Comic Strip regulars were included and the familiar storyline managed to include most of the cliches of the British variety of black-and-white crime thrillers - except maybe a scene by a pier.

There was Mandelson played by Nigel Planer as the Third Man. Margaret Thatcher (Jennifer Saunders) alone in an old house watching endless news reels of the Falklands war and hiding something deeply disturbing in a cupboard, we had just about everything.

Robin Cook's denouncement of the war meant He Had To Go and was summarily dispatched in a soundstage mountaintop scene by Tony.

No one came out looking too good from the whole situation, and it ended after Tony floated along the Thames with a caption that "Tony Blair is still at large"

More, Please.

more bats

A sort of anti-photograph with today's post. It's my attempt to photograph the little bat that flies around in the evening.

My theory is its since the house across the way had some work done.

They added solar cells to the roof.

Good plan, but then they had to arrange for two tall trees to be cut down so that the sun could reach the cells.

So I'm guessing that the bats lived in the quite tall tree.

Notice I said bats, not bat, because I did notice this evening that there were two or three swooping around.

They are very fast and darting so I simply pointed the camera towards one flying around and pressed the shutter.

The frame came out black - but I turned up the brightness to see if anything came out.

It may look like a black smudge, but I know it's a bat.

Lytro light field

The conversations swooped around yesterday including some intra family discoveries of musical and photographic interest.

I was tipped off about the Lytro, which is the new technology camera that doesn't need to be focused. It use light field technology, which is like having a set of micro lenses to support every pixel in the sensor. That means it can record multiple depths of field in the equivalent of the RAW image. The current images are relatively small pixel counts, but it means that the decision about the point of focus can be left until post production.

For most photographers the choice of focus is something done at the point of pressing the shutter, but I suppose this can be used for a new type of point and shoot camera where the camera pretty much captures everything and then lets the 'user' choose the thing to be kept in focus - "Shoot first, focus later"

Of course, we also debated its use for video, but even for photos this must be bashing out quite a large file size.

Still, its one to (literally) watch.

Try it here: Decide how to present the above picture of Coco Rocha with a bicycle. Click to focus on her face, the wall or one or other of the bicycle wheels. Double click to zoom.

celebrating a life

Some of us were at a family get-together yesterday - celebrating the life of Doris.

She'd have been pleased at how it went and the buzzy hospitality of the busy house where we congregated for a chatter.

The right kind of cakes were on offer and it gave a chance for sometimes far-flung parts of the family to catch up on the gossip.

Just how she'd want it.

Låt den rätte komma in

Naomi over at Sittin' in the Hills just wrote about another US re-make of a UK television series. In this case "Prime Suspect" - which every Brit will know.

By chance, right now Sky is showing a different US remake, in this case of the Swedish movie "Let the right one in", which was a classy and touching vampire based story. The remake is called 'Let me in'.

It's another situation where I struggle with the US-made version of a perfectly good European screenplay. I'm only part way through watching it but it seems almost identical though in some ways less touching than the original, as if the actors are working to the marks rather than the feeling.

In principle I've no objections to re-makes but this, like a few others I've seen, is more like a slightly less good carbon copy.

I guess everyone has to get paid.

darkness on the edge

I've noticed its happening again.

Definitely.

The morning. And again in the evening.

It's dark.

Not just that edge of darkness - it's proper darkness right up to when I leave the house.

Same tonight. The light by the door has broken. It was difficult to see the keyhole.

Another few days and I will take it for granted.

Before it starts getting cold.

In which I visit A&R Photography, Liverpool

During the week I was able to visit my good friend the photographer Imran Ali. He runs his studio from Liverpool Bluecoat and along with the excited conversation of catching up with one anothers' exploits, we were able to tinker with the range of goodies in his studio.

I'll confess he was impressed/amused at the bag of camera bits I took along for the session, but no-where near as impressed as I was with all of the lighting gear, reflectors and general electronica he had available for our photo-fest.

And as a delightful addition, we also had blogger friend Debra join us and add Vlad the Hasselblad into the equation.

"So How would you set up this lighting?" asked Imran, as my mind swam into a vortex of unease at the sheer range of options on offer.

"Er, something at the front?" I ventured, "And maybe something ELSE at the side?"

It was clearly too much for me and I was having trouble remembering the different between a grid, a snoot and a sparkling water.

"Reflector" I clung to. "Reflectors...We'll need to use some reflectors"

Because Debra and I arrived at different times I was able to witness the same effect when she was asked similar questions. We both did that sharp intake of breath when we first noticed all the gantries and swivelly things.

There's a clear need for vocabulary and a way to overlay structure onto what could otherwise look like chaos.
My compliments to Imran though. A combination of patience, indulgence and some basic disciplines shepherded both of us through the initial stages of using the lights.

Here's the basic build we used.

1) A 'beauty bowl' front light comprising a bowl containing two diffusers.

2) A grid rim light to provide side highlights

3) A snoot projected backwards onto a black background to provide background colour via a gel



I can make it all sound glib here, but trust me, it took time for me to get this set up and balanced. By comparison watching Imran work was a revelation as he would change the degree of feather on a light with one hand and be simultaneously correcting the power output with the other hand.

Debra and I both experimented with the build up of lights one at a time. It was useful to see the effect of one item such as the side light and what it did to the subject. There are plenty of shadowy pictures of each of us now as we trialled the various combinations. Another thing that was interesting was that we were shooting at ASA50, with quite stopped down apertures (f7.1) and 1/125 shutter. The available light in the room was negligible compared with the power of a thousand suns as the main strobes/flash units fired.

Anyway, I think it worked.
It was incredible how quickly the time passed and we'd planned a grand finale with Debra's Hasselblad film camera (Vlad). 'He' was proving a little moody in this digital world and had to be coaxed to play with the strobe lights. We had a combination of a bulb and an electronic flash firer which Debra had to press simultaneously for her self portrait.
We created a few black Polaroid pictures along the way because the co-ordination required was to the nearest 125th of a second. Gulp. Anyway, the snap above is of the modelling light setup for the shot which we tried several times. I await Debra's development of the film with bated breath. In the meantime, here's a lovely square mono picture from the Canon.
The time ended all too soon but we were all quite pleased with the picture taking and progress. I learned a fantastic amount and it was fascinating working with Imran who mainly shot great pictures SOOC (Straight Out Of Camera) and just used colour correction, minor RAW exposure correction and minimalistic cropping.

I'm already thinking about a return visit!

Lacie 5 Big NAS Server Failure

I sometimes put up posts with very direct titles when I think there may be someone genuinely looking for some information about something that I have discovered. In this case its my Network Attached Storage, which happens to be provided by Lacie.

The box contains 5 drives, each of 1 Terabyte. Four of them are mirrored into a RAID 5 configuration with total redundancy. In addition, the fifth drive is effectively configured as a 'spare' so if one of them goes wobbly, the server will reconfigure itself to use the spare and send an email alert to have the faulty drive replaced.

Also the whole device backs itself up to another single big disk attached to it through a USB connection.

Sounds pretty foolproof, doesn't it?

Well I knew there would be a weak link (I can think of a couple actually).

The one that created the fail was the most obvious. The power supply. Yes. It has blown up but in a subtle way. The lights still come on on the power brick and also momentarily in the server. The Lan connection lights glimmer faintly as well. But it's really a dead supply.

I ejected all five drives from the back of the unit and then tried a lower rated supply (only 2.5Amps) as a quick proof that the main unit was working. Sure enough, all the lights came on properly as the server tried to re-boot without any disks.

Internet ordering time. Although Lacie are out of stock.

Normal service will be resumed.

Eventually.

Update Yes, a short trip to Maplin Electronics and I'm back in business with a new power supply.

12V 120Watts.

Technically its over-specified for the server, but I'd rather have something not operating at its limits. Now is a good time to run an extra full backup.

everybody must get stones

This week has been rather hectic.

Sometimes its necessary to pick the right path across the week, predicting where one will be and juggling hours to fit things in. Back on Sunday I'd driven somewhere only to be greeted with a message that suggested I needed to be somewhere different.

It was an error by the sender, who had inadvertently set up meetings that clashed horribly with my schedule.

There was little I could do on Sunday evening but make a plaintive request to a voicemail to get things rejigged. It all worked out in the end, so I have been able to happily hop-scotch my way along the week.

It's all about picking the right coloured stones. They may all look the same from a distance, but up close they can be very different.

pause for breath?

What a difference a few days make.

Here's the supersaturated end of Summer that somehow crept into October. I'd been out for a cycle ride and this is one of the places I sometimes stop for a few minutes to take in the scene.

On one of my routes I think of it as 'half way around' although the time to get back to base can be quite short because of the helpful gradients. Actually, there's one more 'steep bit' ahead too which can get the pulse racing.

Maybe its good to sometimes have those pause moments in the schedule.

Annoying short con in Westminster

Out and about again in 28 degree Westminster today. When I'm with other people in the know, we usually cross over to the upriver side of Westminster Bridge if we are heading across it. It's a way to avoid some of the barricades of tourists who are making the most of the fine weather and decidedly out in force.

It's actually quite funny walking along chatting to someone and having to dodge dozens of people taking pictures of Parliament, buses, traffic lights, taxis, the River, the Eye and so on. It requires a sort of crowd mastery to stay close and able to talk in a tourist mayhem.

To make it even more challenging, there's one of those gangs of tourist fleecers operating on Westminster Bridge at the moment, complete with home made plastic disks and metal cups for the three shell game.

Its always interesting to watch the edges of such games. There'll be someone standing in the road looking for police. There'll be a couple of extra large people around for 'management purposes' and the actual crowds around the makeshift tables seem to comprise quite a few people of similar ethnicity as the people operating the games. The marks seem to frequently be from the far east.

A couple of days ago a single policeman on a motorcycle arrived and in seconds half the bridge's hustlers had disappeared.

But I don't think of this offshore short-con as a London thing. I've seen it in Paris and Milan, but in truth am a little appalled we have it operating across the road from Parliament.

the pipistrelle bat swoops around me again tonight

I have been away from home intermittently over the last few days, but was home in daylight tonight.

It was a close thing though as the sun was just setting.

I decided to make a cup of tea and look to see if the pipistrelle bat would make an appearance.

Sure enough, just after sunset, the little bat appeared and began its swooping and weaving flight around the garden.

I've come to regard it as 'our garden's bat' because it does pretty much stay within the perimeter.

I have previously tried to capture it with a camera, but it is way too fast for that, unless I were to set up some kind of flash rig.
Some people are terrified of bats, but I find the swooping aerial ballet performance as it hunts for insects quite magical.

It seems fairly unruffled by my presence and I can stand outside watching it perform at not much more than arms length and occasionally see it do an extra spiral around me as it takes more of a sounding.

What is less apparent is that the bat is firing out bleeps of very high frequency sound to check for insects using a sort of echo-location. The sounds are actually extremely loud but too high for us to hear except for an occasional click like fingers being snapped.

...and we are not even in the Halloween month yet.