What Jessie Did Next...

...being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.

Author: Jess (page 5 of 26)

Several years have passed since Wakefield Council levelled half of the city stretching from Brook Street down to the old gasworks, diverting Marsh Way and knocking down (among others) the 1960s market hall, the Tut & Shive pub, Marsh Way multistory car-park, the Jacob’s Well Tavern pub, and assorted bits of factory and warehouse around Duke Of York Street. Despite the disasters which befell the investment company leaving a big muddy hole in the ground for the best part of a year and a half, Trinity Walk opened its doors a month ago today and let the scathing public in.

Well, it’s not bad: it’s clean, it’s tidy (not for long I’m sure but let’s enjoy the moment), it’s big and airy and convenient from the bus station. Very few of the original lines of roads and walkways have been kept from the old market so it can be quite strange when retracing ‘where things used to be’ (for instance, Pizza Express is sited where my grandfather’s local butcher “Our Benny” was). Most of the diverted Marsh Way area is now a huge labyrinthine underground car-park for instance.

A good shopping experience then? Hmm, so-so. It’s blustery and the whole thing acts as a wind tunnel; even on calm days it’s breezy and when I popped down on Saturday you could quite easily have landsurfed down the main concourse. I’ve not sat on the Costa Coffee plaza yet but I can imagine it getting a bit too cold in winter. Parking’s a bit of a nightmare first time round due to the car-park layout. Usual chain-stores, nothing greatly interesting or that you can’t get elsewhere but useful when you need an outfit in a pinch. There’s only one shop there which I would consider to be anywhere near ‘independent’ (but which is still a chain of course), a clothing outlet called ‘Pulp’ who flog vintage t-shirt designs, tight jeans, hoodies and badges – the stuff the youth (and I) wear. Nice people.

Inevitably, the rest of Wakefield has suffered as a consequence of Trinity Walk’s birth: although we have a couple of new ‘big’ shops (Debenhams, H&M, the return to Wakefield of ‘Next’ after a long absence for instance) migrants have come from elsewhere throughout the city. Sainsbury’s move from Ings Road has left the other end of Wakefield much quieter despite the proliferation of retail park units down that end (and made Ings Road Roundabout less congested). The removal of Body Shop, Top Man, Top Shop, Dorothy Perkins and others have left the Ridings Centre little more than a shell for bargain shops and (bizarrely) a Christian Bible Study Centre. Shops have simply moved around – contents may settle in transit – and it feels an odd juxtaposition walking from the closed and abandoned retail units of Teall Street onto the clean-cut and well-lit lines of Trinity Walk itself. I suspect if BHS, Primark and M&S moved elsewhere it’d put the nail in the coffin of the Ridings Centre, and it’s pretty telling that a press release published in local paper Wakefield Express tried to jolly everyone up as they’d had small units Holland & Barrett and the Clarks store extend their lease. Woo.

In talking to some of the stallholders and shopkeepers around the Trinity Walk area it would seem the footfall has changed quite substantially too. Mr Allum the butcher says it’s made a heck of a change, positive news after several years of being stuck at the end of Brook Street ‘not quite on the way to anywhere’. Reports from the outdoor market stallholders is good but still very much a fine-tuning affair: Mark Venables the grocer moved his stall about 20ft into the main market and saw an increase in sales being directly on the path from the crossing to the bus station. Conversely the indoor market has seen a drop because nobody’s going ‘via’ the building (the food hall of course has persistently vacant units and we still don’t have a fishmonger but I’ve done that to death over the years). Maybe that will change when it rains.

More generally, it fascinates me if you count from the birth of my eldest (which almost coincided with the first big demolition – that of the old bus station), Wakefield has changed more in the past 10 years than in my entire lifetime: a new market, a huge new shopping centre, a bus station, new council offices at Merchant Gate, the Hepworth Gallery and waterfront to name but a few. In the next couple of years we’ll have the new railway station, more council offices, the controversial move of Wakefield Museum, and the new swimming pool (construction began today). Some years ago my father moved to Australia and (save for a couple of flying visits for family reasons) hasn’t been back since; I’m not sure he’d recognise the place, let alone drive round it.

Ultimately though it boils down to this: Wakefield wants to be a big city, a huge player, but with Leeds so close and no University (yes that does matter in my opinion) it’s always going to struggle not to come a poor second to the city facilities offered a few junctions up the M1 – and if Leeds is having problems filling the market and shopping units, and has the same shops over that way, what hope for Wakefield and Trinity Walk? Wakefield might just be a bit too small for it.

So in what is now an annual event, once more I plonked myself behind the camera taking photos in Santa’s grotto at Wrenthorpe Primary School (previous instalments are documented from from 2009 and 2008).

Refresher: it entailed taking pics of Santa and kids after they’d just got their gifts. The ‘grotto’ is a little side-room with ‘fireplace’ and obligatory sled full of toys, and a sideroom where I hid until required to take pics plus the computer operator could sit to print the images. The first time we did it there were about 180 pics and around 250 kids so it’s not something to be done lightly.

This year I repeated last year’s setup with one important change: Adobe Lightroom 3 now has a ‘tethering’ feature. This means you can plug your camera direct into the computer with a USB cable, take a pic and LR3 will process and make available the photo immediately; the new print function also enables two pics to be selected and I can immediately slap two 6×4 photos on one piece of A4 with all colour modifications. Much quicker, and lots less messing around.

I had a willing assistant in Alex, a lovely lass who’d never used a Mac or LR3 but still cottoned onto the process pretty quickly. I reckon that with a little practice I could probably do it all on my own, really.

The other (minor) change was in the off-body aerial flashgun. I used a 420ex last year on a stand with a remote trigger, but this year used a 250W strobe with an umbrella. Slightly less harsh, lots more control over intensity.

(I love Lightroom 3, it makes life so much easier…)

While I’m doing less contract work, I’ve been concentrating on taking snaps…

Alongside photographing such luminaries as Miles Hunt (from 90s band The Wonderstuff), former drug-lord Howard Marks, and the usual local Wakefield bands I’ve starting touting myself around as a more general event photographer; after all, I need the cash and I’m not too bad at it (he said, modestly). I’ve got the kit from here-and-there: a few months ago I acquired a small portraiture lighting kit comprising 3 x 250W strobes (with modelling lights), umbrellas, softboxes and stands. I also managed to blag a 3-metre backdrop stand and a couple of used backdrops – well I say used, the black one is still in its wrapper and brand new as far as I can tell! I’ve had a bit of practice and assistance from my old mucker Neal Lewis on strobism plus reading up on techniques in various tomes such as Light Science & Magic and the results aren’t half bad.

I’ve also been asked to do my first few weddings, so have quoted for those: no prints, just CD, but you get around 250 photos in a candid style (no, I’m not doing freebies but nice of you to ask ;))

A week or two back I found myself photographing Leeds Guide Retail Therapy Awards 2010, the first awards ceremony I’ve done and an amusing experience herding drunk award-winners around the stage to get some photos (I’d link directly to them here but they’re embargoed until tomorrow). This sorta ties into the thought that in order to be a photographer of people (weddings, portraiture, events, etc.) you really need to be assertive as a person and be able to easily gel with folks, which I think I’m probably reasonably OK at. Client seems happy anyway, and I think there’ll be some in the print edition of Leeds Guide which comes out tomorrow (Weds 10 Nov 2010).

In any case, it’ll help top up the coffers and pay for the insane electricity bill which British Gas seem to have decided to send us. Idiots.

Tomorrow is Photocamp Bradford {2010}, the annual ‘unconference’ for photographers where sessions are part-seminar, part-discussion, part-talk/presentation, all sorts of things. Last year was a lot of fun and I met a lot of Flickr-ers, and I learned tons of stuff. It takes place at Bradford Media Museum (formerly known as the Museum of Film, Photography & Television), and includes talks and access to the museum’s curators, etc.

So this year I’ve volunteered to run a session on gig photography – not just techniques but also how I got into it in the first place, breaks which worked, essentials to keep in the bag, kit, etiquette, and post-processing. I’m aiming for it to be about 50% talk, 50% discussion so my slides will be starter-points for discussion rather than me standing up preaching at everyone. The session will be about an hour long and is pencilled in just after lunch; as with all unconferences though it’s subject to a bit of change – I hope I don’t clash with any other sessions I want to see such as the wedding session and the landscape session from the headliner speakers.

There are still a few tickets available – go to the Photocamp Bradford {2010} website and follow the links through, you can buy them from the museum in-person too.

(Yes, I should have blogged about this earlier but it’s not really been that high a priority for me given I’ve been up to my gills in work. Sorry.)

Nowadays, I take a lot of photos in a shoot – probably about 500 at a minimum, but more likely a few thousand if I’m on-site for more than an hour or so. Gig photography mandates this a bit and in the more extreme venues you can end up ‘scattergunning’. As I carry the EOS 5D Mark II and shoot in full RAW it’s inevitable that a shoot will eat up at least a 16GB memory card (probably a lot more) so I need stacks of memory cards for when I’m out on the road and can’t process the photos in a hurry.

Browsing around I happened upon 7dayshop.com. I’ve picked up some cheap flash memory from them in the past (2GB no-name SD cards for the DAB radio and the kids’ cameras) which was fine, so splashed out on a few 32GB Kingston Elite Pro CF cards. The first big shoot after they arrived was Pride London 2010: in previous years I ate up 70GB just shooting JPEG, this year shooting RAW it was going to be utter carnage on the memory side – we’re talking at least 25MB an image here.

(I also bought a Vosonic digital wallet with a 500GB hard disk in it, useful for dumping off photos if I ran out or in case of unexpected issues – I’m quite glad I did that, in hindsight.)

During the course of the day, the Kingston cards performed well. Slow to write but you don’t expect blistering speeds for a penny shy of £60, and the occasional check in review mode showed the images were writing nicely. Simon (who was photographing with me) began running out of CF, and he’d obtained some 16GB Kingston cards so I offered to dump the images onto the Vosonic; we sat down for a quick pint while they copied, the Vosonic chugged through the first few then reported a corruption of the card! Er, what? The images were fine on the back of the camera, we checked again. It was stumbling on one pic so Si deleted it off using the camera, we tried again. It chugged through, then stumbled on a different image. Uh oh. I can’t remember what we did then – probably switched to another card or I lent Si one, I honestly don’t know. Either way, that was the first sign the Kingston cards weren’t up to scratch.

Fast forward to post-shoot when I started dumping images onto my laptop. 32GB of images from one of the Kingston cards and it seemed the computer didn’t recognise it using my USB card-reader – I panicked a little, and connected the camera up directly to the laptop… where it read fine. Phew, but still worrying. I tried it with another reader (I’ve got several card-readers) and all of them exhibited the same behaviour with this particular 32GB card: will read in the camera directly, won’t read on anything else.

One of the 16GB CF cards began showing the same symptoms last week, in the middle of a shoot in Hull. Popped it into the Vosonic where it refused to completely read the card and I ended up using Cardrescue to get the images back. Another pit-of-the-stomach moment, one I can do without.

Since then I’ve done a bit of digging and asking around – three friends are reporting that the cheap Kingston cards cause issues for them, and a discussion on a maillist yielded a link to criticism of Kingston’s MicroSD cards and another FAQ on Kingston CF compatibility. It all points to Kingston rebranding cheap cards and using new microcontrollers from about 2009 onwards which perhaps don’t meet with the electrical specifications demanded by the CF interface.

Needless to say I won’t be buying Kingston again, and now I have about 80GB of CF cards I don’t trust. An expensive mistake, but not as expensive as if I’d lost a shoot completely (I’ve since replaced the Kingston cards with Sandisk and verified they are genuine).

Last weekend was Pride London 2010; once again we’d been asked if we could take photos for Paleday and The Pink Singers on the main stage, once again a privilege to do so.

Given last year’s experiences of schlepping to and fro from Battersea I thought it prudent to get down the day before and stay at a hotel somewhere in central London. We’d had plenty of notice this year and I booked Covent Garden Travelodge: pretty reasonable for our needs and easy for transport links. You don’t expect luxury at Travelodges, just a good night’s sleep so this provided all we needed.

So anyway, we got down on the Friday. After a bit of confusion I collected our Press passes from backstage in Trafalgar Square then wandered up to Camden for a lovely evening with friends (especially nice to meet Jharda again, and have unexpected company from Richie).

We were told that this year we were to have not just passes but also wristbands which I needed to collect from King’s Cross before the parade started. This meant a bit of a mad dash for me while Nicky and Si headed for the parade itself. Bad timing for the weekend – I was naffed off to discover the entire Circle line was shut down for maintenance which in turn led to various bus rides to Baker Street simply trying to get there before the parade started! Good news, I managed it (with just quarter of an hour to spare), making my way to the head of the parade led by Boris Johnson and Peter Tatchell.

There were a lot of photographers at the head of the parade – when it started we were moved back. Unfortunately (and this is my first experience of such behaviour) there were a couple of photographers who didn’t take any notice and started to spoil it for the rest of us conscientious lot; one photog was threatened with removal of his pass, and another idiot almost came to blows with a Parade Director. I strongly believe that there’s unwritten laws of courtesy when you’re a photographer, but this time it was a little… well, nasty I suppose.

I got ahead of the parade and started grabbing shots of the crowds of which there were enough to keep me going. At one point I turned back to see I was about 20 metres in front of the head of the parade, nothing in front of me and nothing behind me; at either side were thousands of cheering screaming people. Yes, it would seem I led the parade (pic here). Hurrah!

It soon became apparent we had a bit of an issue – how do we drop back into the parade to take shots of participants given all the photographers are being shoved back? Si and Nicky managed to do this by blending into the crowd while the parade flag went past, but I was skeptical of this given I’d got two huge cameras around my neck. I slipped out and walked with the spectators on Oxford Street while the first few floats went past, then found a steward near a break in the barriers.

“Can I get in the parade please?” I wibbled, after getting his attention. “I’m Press, meant to be over there. Sorry.”
“Um no. We can’t part the barriers.”
“Bother. I’m really meant to be photographing.”
He thought for a moment and grinned slightly. “Right, you could climb over?”

So I handed him the larger camera and lens, and vaulted the barrier with about £3k-worth of camera kit. I won’t repeat that experience but at least I was in the parade!

I walked with lots of floats – the London Gay Men’s Chorus, the LGBT Lib Dems, Labour and Tory groups, various campaign groups, and the London Raiders softball team – all the while taking photos (many of which are on my Flickr stream, all of which are on photos.jml.net). I was sorry to miss Gaz (who was apparently in Soho Square), the Gaydar lot, and one of the Pinkies I’ve been talking with since I photographed him last year. Never mind, there’s always the 2011 parade!

Post-parade, Si and Nicky were waiting for me with a nice chilled pint in The Sherlock Holmes pub just off Trafalgar Square. Recovery time, a good sit down. Phew.

Next stop – the main stage. I arrived to find one of the performers from West End show ‘Wicked’ singing her little heart out, and it was at that point I discovered that this year our passes and wristbands didn’t just get us into the press pit but it also got us backstage. Bonus!

The stage was higher this year, by my estimation about 18″. This meant the angles were a lot sharper on some of the photos, but the press pit was also larger. Unfortunately, it was also a lot more full and there was quite a lot of shoving around – unfortunate. Some of the acts were pounced on by the photographers (including for some reason the cast of the West End show ‘Hair’) while others didn’t get touched and my philosophy in such situations is that I’d prefer to get photos other people don’t, so step back. Instead I took photos of acts waiting to go onstage, little bits of interaction between performers and producers, photos nobody else would get. Given some of the reactions so far, it was appreciated.

Anyway, back to the day. After a while, myself and Si went for a wander to see what the Leicester Square stage was like. Crowded, lots of people around. Some good shots taken, quite nice, and we got the (now usual) kick out of being able to walk through the exit and go out of the entrance cos we had press passes, baby! 😛

We fought our way up through Soho, to find there was nothing in Soho Square – not even many paraders. We took a few snaps (for that is all they were) and set off back.

At that point, I received a text message from Nicky: “Pink Singers all lining up”. SHIT, THIS IS THE BAND I’M HERE TO PHOTOGRAPH AND I’M STILL UP IN SOHO. We run as fast as we can through seething masses of people. We got to the main stage to find that yes, they’d all lined up but weren’t on for about another 30 minutes. Thanks for panicking me, love! Still, it left me backstage to take some more candid shots – excellent.

Paleday and the Pink Singers were wonderful – a better performance than last year, and I’m looking forward to Paleday doing some more full gigs.

And so we went on into the evening, with the final act being the DE Experience, a drag act performing most frequently at the Vauxhall Tavern. Lots of photos, lots of crowd shots, some opportunity to mess with the fisheye lens. It all finished up around 8:30pm so we headed back to the hotel.

(My t-shirt went down well – I’d opted for a red number with JAN MOIR THINKS I’M DIRTY printed on it. I got stopped a few times for people to take my photo, and met someone professing to be involved with the Daily Mail who said ‘don’t worry mate, we f*ing hate her too’. Comedy.)

Finally after half an hour of rest, showering, etc. we’re ready for a night out in Soho. That was a bit of a mess really, the whole place seemed to shut down about 11:30pm, maybe because of the broken glass? There were police everywhere and unless we wanted to go in a very very crowded club (Koko anyone?) we’d be out of luck. So, we strolled back to the hotel and in a display of middle-classed heterosexuality we had a few bottles of Carlsberg until the hotel bar closed. Meh.

There were about 80GB of photos this time round – a smaller number in total but I was shooting RAW and dumping them to a Vosonic Imagetank to prevent running out of CF (instead I ran out of juice on the BP511 batteries on the Canon 30D). I was carrying the 24-105mm f/4 IS L lens, the 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lens and the f/2.8 fisheye (using it as an ultrawide on the 30D body at times). It seemed a good mix, and was supplemented sometimes by the Speedlite 580EX II flashgun to provide fill.

My photos are gradually appearing on my Flickr stream and over at our photo gallery.

A while back I acquired a dirt-cheap secondhand pair of SoundLAB Gyroscan units (G017X) for use on-stage as spotlights in combination with my ENTTEC DMX-IS computer-controlled DMX interface. The idea being that I can set them up for each song, mark a cross on the stage and that’s where the singers stand – cheap computer-controlled spotlights, yay.

There’s a couple of gotchas with this:

First, the Gyroscan DMX interface is inverted – that is to say, hot/cold are the wrong way round on the DMX pinout. While professional establishments tend to have DMX inverters to sort this stuff out I didn’t have any and it seemed to be a simple matter of popping the back off the unit and swapping the cables around. Ten minutes with a soldering iron and we’re in business.

Second, there’s no DMXIS fixture file which will deal with them properly. The Prosound Smart Scan II file comes close but wastes a few (possibly precious) channels which makes it unsuitable if you want everything on one screen. Thus I’ve put a DMXIS fixture ‘macro’ together which if you’re using Windows you can save in C:Program FilesENTTECDMXISDmxLibrarySoundlab and it’ll automatically find it:

Pan
V,0,255,
Tilt
V,0,255,
Gobo
S,0,24,Black
S,25,49,White
S,50,74,Pink
S,75,99,Cyan
S,100,124,Yellow
S,125,149,Green
S,150,174,Orange
S,175,197,WhDots
S,198,226,Rotating
S,227,255,Strobe
Rotation
V,0,255,

This seems to work fine for me and also makes the positioning trackpad work in the bottom left corner of the DMXIS control panel.

The only real comment I have on the Gyroscan units (bear in mind here I’m still an amateur at this) is that they’re a bit slow to cue up a gobo. Other than that they seem fine!

I’ve got a new MacBook Pro – one of the Intel i7 ones, 17″, nice piece of kit. I’ve also re-evaluated my external disk requirements on my desktop and bought a dual eSATA/USB RAID0+1 array for storing my Lightroom library.

Sick of running it on USB (and I’m running out of USB ports anyway) I purchased a LaCie SATA II ExpressCard 34 adaptor via Amazon. Today’s been the first chance I’ve had to switch it over as I’m working from home, and installed the drivers as per the instructions. I plugged the card in… instant kernel panic on Snow Leopard. Oops.

No problems, reboot. Except it won’t – not at all. A reboot of the machine hit a kernel panic within a few seconds, not even enough for it to bring up the OS tail. The error is: “thread wants credential but has no BSD process” – a completely unusable system.

I eventually got it down to out-of-date drivers supplied with the CD accompanying the card. The correct drivers are here, and you will not be able to boot your system unless you do the following:

  1. Reboot holiding down the shift key, so you enter ‘safe boot mode’. This will take a while to boot so you might want to make a cuppa.
  2. Download the drivers from here.
  3. Install the drivers and immediately reboot.

I haven’t had any problems since.

(Apparently this is to do with the SIS chipset not addressing 64-bit memory space correctly, but booting into 32-bit compatibility mode doesn’t work either.)

Last Saturday was Wakefield Acorn Computer Show, run by Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club.

There’s not much really to report as I don’t use RISC OS, but the highlights for me were an O2 Joggler running Netsurf and the current (maturing) status of RISC OS Open on Beagleboard hardware (photo).

I took along the Domesday Project of course as well as a couple of other machines. It was quite good having the Domesday running on a large 32″ flatpanel (photo) given the small crowds which would occasionally gather. I am also very pleased to report that the gentleman from Archive magazine brought along some more correspondence from the 1984 ‘Domesday Submission Kit’ with letters acknowledging difficulty in surveys and other things. I’ll get them scanned in as soon as I can.

Alongside the ‘normal’ BBC Master 128, I’d got my ultra-pimped Beeb running: a Master 128 with ARM7TDMI coprocessor, USB interface, CF card storage, 100baseTx Ethernet, and switchable 3.2/3.5 MOS.

There was also a Chuckie Egg incident – I thought I’d hit the high-score for the show (and indeed had red mist while playing it) but then got thoroughly beaten later on with a score of over 200,000. Boo! Need more practice!

Nice to see some of the 8-bit enthusiast crowd there again including Dave Moore from Retro Software and Ian Wolstenholme (I wonder if Ian made it home in one piece on the train, carrying an A7000, an A3000 and three Technomatic Winchester hard disks?).

Finally, I was a good boy and didn’t spend piles of cash on the charity stall (not that there was much of interest), coming away with a replacement monitor for the Domesday system for the princely sum of £2.

My full set of photos from the event are here.

Next Acorn ‘presence’ will be at Bletchley on 19th and 20th June as part of the Vintage Computer Festival. Mind, I won’t be there for most of the Saturday (as OP have a gig in Wakefield) but I believe on the Sunday there is a major ‘project day’ effort to try and get the Domesday Community Disc properly archived. Maybe see you there!

Unless you’ve had me on ‘ignore’ for a month or so (and that includes ‘in-person’), it won’t have escaped your attention that I’ve been going on ad nauseum about the government’s Digital Economy Bill which is an attempt to deal with online copyright, broadband, and all sorts of things. It’s a wide-reaching bill which will affect everyone online in the UK (yes, even you Mum).

I’m not going to go into the actual provisions of the Bill here, because it’s been covered elsewhere. Suffice to say that you, as an Internet subscriber, can be disconnected and prohibited from having an Internet connection without judicial review or trial, simply if you are suspected of infringing copyright. Infringing can be something as simple as unauthorised use of someone’s photo. You can also add ‘blocking websites the Government doesn’t like’ to the mix (Wikileaks was cited as an example in Parliament) – this was withdrawn in the third reading as part of clause 18 but now lives on in clause 1 (thanks ChrisE for clarifying that – Ed.).

As a result of the impending election, it was consigned to ‘wash-up’ – that’s the bit of the Parliamentary session where they try to get unfinished business done before they all go back to their constituencies and make promises they can’t keep. Last night the Bill had its third reading and amid protest it went through (although in a small victory Clause 43 was removed, that’s the ‘orphan works’ bill which would stuff photographers, there’s an AP article here about it). I am reliably informed it was a three-line whip, although there were a few rebels which I’ll discuss in a moment.

While all this was happening I was online watching both the second and third readings on BBC Democracy Live with a copy of the Register of Members Interests in another window to cross-reference. There was of course a substantial discussion on Twitter resulting in the #debill tag ‘trending’ worldwide (my own contributions can be read here if you wade through my feed). What was interesting was that there were politicians actually in the Chamber reading Twitter and responding to questions and suggestions – the most prominent being Tom Watson MP (Lab) (“First time i’ve ever broken the whip in the chamber. I feel physically sick.”) and Dr Evan Harris (Lib Dem) – possibly the first example of directly influencing a debate through online participation?

After the second reading on Tuesday night, Mo put together an open letter which quickly gathered signatories. At least Peter Luff had the dignity to respond, although I don’t agree with his stance at all.

The list of who finally voted against the bill is here. Kudos to the MPs who went against the whip and did their own research – I found myself agreeing with John Redwood MP on Tuesday night in the second reading, quite a bizarre feeling, that!

For my part I wrote to my MP twice – Ed Balls MP (Lab). He didn’t reply, not even an acknowledgement – although in discussion with local activists this is apparently unsurprising. I hear others wrote to their MPs and received a stock ‘I’m concerned and will vote no’ response – then they didn’t even show up for the vote. A few sent stock responses towing the party line (yes I’m looking at you Yvette Cooper MP).

I am not protesting that legislation isn’t needed; I am not protesting that there are Bad Things which need addressing; I am not saying we don’t need some sort of Parliamentary intervention to ensure that the UK’s “digital economy” is protected. What I am saying is that it is a very very complex technical issue which MPs by their own admission did not understand, and which amid protest was forced through without proper scrutiny in a deal which (reading between the lines) was probably done against the Electoral Reform Bill. Over 20,000 of the electorate (many of them the creatives this is supposed to protect) were protesting – that should mean that it gets a better reading than a rushed couple of debates. Nor am I singling out any political party – you were all railroaded by your party whips (mind, Twitter user @holizz points out that only 5 people outside of Labour voted in favour of the bill).

(A sidenote: those of you who work in politics and have repeatedly bleated at me that ‘the system works’ and ‘it’s democracy’ can take your copy of Hansard, roll it up nice and tight, and stuff it up your arse.)

So, we see what happens next; it’s back to the Lords and then I suppose Royal Assent. I have it on pretty good authority though that there is already talk of a Version 2 of the Bill, so the battle may be lost but the war goes on.

The full amended text of the Bill isn’t available yet, but once it is I’ll link to it from here. Trefor’s blog also has some good comment if you want to read more, and if you’re of the opinion that ‘because they weren’t debating the MPs don’t care’ then you should also read Mark Goodge’s diatribe An Empty Chamber Is Not An Empty Mind. Enjoy.

Update: As promised, Guardian Tech have posted A Quick Guide To The Digital Economy Bill – useful reading if you don’t know what it’s on about.

After a period of quiet not least because I couldn’t get from one end of the garage to the other, I’m back fiddling with 8-bit machines and preparing for several ‘appearances’ at retro computing events throughout the UK.

Sat 24th April: Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Computer Show 2010 is a regular in the calendar and although it has been more on the brand new RISC OS side in recent years, this year there will be a stronger 8-bit presence. I will be there exhibiting ‘new things you can do with your BBC Micro’ including some of the flash-based storage units, new coprocessors, and the latest version of Sprow’s Ethernet interface.

Sat 19th June – Sun 20th June: Vintage Computer Festival at Bletchley Park. I’ve been asked to demonstrate the Domesday Project and discuss its impact and history with visitors – it’s also likely there will be a small Econet setup with some interesting bits and bobs, alongside vendors and a fleamarket in case you fancy spending some of your hard-earned on ancient rigs.

Sat 20th November – Sun 21st November: R3play in Blackpool. I’ve no idea what the Acorn presence will be at this show, but given that Arcadian’s on the organising committee it’ll probably feature some of us!

Some of these events will be very busy so if you want to have some old Acorn fun you probably should put these in your diary and organise tickets now. I know the recommended hotel for the VCF is almost full, so get your skates on.

Edit: Dave just mailed me and corrected on the dates, R3PLAY is now 6th-7th November.

I took most of yesterday off to pay a visit to Calumet in Manchester for a Canon Professional Services roadshow where they were showing off some of the new stuff.

I like CPS (formerly CPN) – it’s open to everyone who has spent a ridiculous amount of money and provides on-site support from engineers at the larger events, ‘masterclass’ type newsletters, plus loan kit if yours packs up. More importantly (to me) their repair service guarantees you’ll have an item back within 5 days or send you loan equipment to use.

However, I can quite honestly say I was drawn to this particular event by the promise of free CCD cleaning and service! Normally I fork out at least £40 a shot for this (plus travel) so killing two birds with one (free) stone seemed like a good idea and I wouldn’t have to hang around in a cafe while the cameras were ‘seen to’. Besides, the 30D sorely needed a clean anyway.

The ‘roadshow’ itself was quite small and hidden in a meeting room in the depths of Calumet’s offices. One side of the room was given over to printing technology (the Pixma range) and the other featured a table full of lenses, flashguns and camera bodies to try out – lots of toys. One end of the room was given over to a small theatre-style arrangement of chairs, but no screen to see example images (which seemed a little odd).

So what did I have a play with? I’d heard the hype around the 70-200 f/2.8 IS L II lens (I have the first version) and had a quick go – the optics have apparently been redesigned but it was difficult to be able to compare in an office room (more about that later). Additionally the Canon rep wouldn’t let me store any images on a CF because “it’s a pre-release lens, this is the only one in Europe, and it’s not the final one”. Disappointing!

That particular restriction only applied to a couple of items though. I also fiddled with:

  • 17-40mm f/4 L ultrawide (as a complement to my 24-105mm f/4 lens).
  • MP-65 Macro which gave some insane results – this photo was taken from a distance of 15mm. Great for getting pics of bugs I guess!
  • 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, a lens I’ve had my eye on for a while which could give some fun gig shots. I’ll probably nab one of these from lensesforhire.co.uk for a week so I can make sure it’s good enough.

Then there were the camera bodies, and I had a play with an EOS 7D, an EOS 1D Mark IV and an EOS 1Ds Mark III. I really missed the full-frame, and the 1Ds Mark III didn’t really ‘wow’ me either, so it served a purpose in that it made me realise how happy I am with my EOS 5D Mark II and stopped me lusting after toys for a while. Additionally, the absence of edge-AF (the diamond is concentrated in the centre on all models) means I’ll wait a bit longer, thanks.

(Sidenote: I asked about the possibility of a ‘1Ds Mark IV’ and was told nothing was in development or in the roadmap.)

It was great getting hands-on experience of the kit and talking to people who obviously knew what they were on about, but it would have been so much better if we had something to take photos of when trying equipment out – even a couple of bowls of fruit with a softbox would have been something. As it was, I used the Canon guys themselves as models and did the best I could with the flourescent lighting itself.

I pottered back to Wakefield once the cameras had been cleaned and I’d played with enough toys. Nice to see the human face of Canon, and worth the jaunt.

Photos (and examples while playing with kit) are here.

Edit: I just got a call – I won the £500 voucher to spend at Calumet as well – what a lovely surprise!

Given my recent post on IPv4 exhaustion, I read with interest that 1.0.0.0/8 has been reallocated (to APNIC) as part of the efforts to debogon and reuse address space.

Previously there’s been discussion on which /8 should be allocated. A good read, and covers issues I’d expect to become more important as the IPv4 space is depleted. IANA keep a document on /8 RIR assignments here.

I don’t do much networks stuff nowadays, but what’s important from my programmatic point-of-view is IP address validation within user interfaces – I know at least two systems I’ve been involved in developing have IP address input validation; consequently I think you can probably expect to see older (poorly programmed) routers thinking erroneously ‘oh, that IP address is invalid!’.

Now a few of my friends and acquaintances have dSLR cameras and enjoy music photography I thought I’d mention one of the better venues for gigs in Wakefield but which also has the most undesirable light; certainly it’s the most hostile I’ve come across for a photographer.

I’m talking about Escobar in Wakefield, a music venue which features quite a lot of upcoming bands alongside mainstream returners (such as The Cribs, Reverend & The Makers, The Kooks, etc.). As such, amateur photographers can find themselves shooting away at their mates’ ‘Unsigned Bands’ gig on a Monday alongside professional music-press photographers – the walls of the venue are decorated with images of past gigs and magazine articles sporting photos of previous successes. Myself, I’ve photographed there frequently including Leeds band Vessels, Rosie Doonan, Jonny The Firth, Chat Noir and a few of the Louder Than Bombs showcase nights.

The lighting can be described as ‘atmospheric’ – it’s quite dark with a predominance on red and orange lighting fading in and out (it doesn’t seem predictable and there’s no obvious lighting desk); as a result it’s very easy to unexpectedly blow out the red channel on your photos. There is no side-access to the stage so you’re left crouching near the barrier on either side with the crowd at your back.

From that particular venue I’ve learned quite a few lessons, most of which apply to ‘hostile stage environments’ in general:

  • It is a trial simply to focus on your subject let alone grab a steady shot so you do have to get quite arty.
  • I break my own rule in this particular venue and use a flashgun (checking – if I can – that it’s OK before using it, some bands find it distracting).
  • The flashgun is on-body and bounced off the ceiling – the main stage area has a brown ceiling which provides a nice warm glow.
  • I put a 1/4 CTO gel over the flashgun head -pick yours up from flashgels.co.uk and use a rubber band to keep it on (Royal Mail red rubber bands are ideal). This colour-corrects the artificial light, otherwise you will get an undesirable contrast in the blue-tinged subject near the flash and the warmer background.
  • The flashgun’s own focus-assist is pretty useful too, even if you stop the flashgun from firing it can help a lot.
  • As we’re using flash, we might as well do some 2nd-curtain work – that’s where the flash fires as the shutter closes. You can get some nice effects with long shutter speeds and 2nd-curtain such as motion blur in this photo.
  • Shooting in RAW is absolutely essential as you will need to colour-correct afterwards in Lightroom or Aperture.
  • Forget Tv and Av modes – utterly useless in this scenario. You will need to go fully manual and ride your settings. Expect a lot of duff photos as a result.
  • You may get away without a flashgun if you are using a very high ISO (start at ISO1600 in Escobar), have a fast (f/1.8 or higher) lens, and your subject doesn’t move around much – this particular venue has a lot of folk bands and Indie bands with slow songs which suit that setup.
  • If all else fails you can shove stuff into monochrome and slap on the effects, but I feel it’s always nice to get ‘real’ photos first.
  • Oh and whatever you do, don’t get in the way of the punters – they paid to be there.

Hopefully this will help a few photographers in Escobar itself, but in general those are the rules I apply in the ‘dark’. You can see my pics from this particular venue here.

For preference I use both Canon EOS 40D and Canon EOS 5D Mk 2 – although the former is fairly useless unless I’m using the f/1.4 50mm or the f/1.2 85mm – and the lenses I use for preference in the venue are f/2.8 IS L 70-200, f/4 IS L 24-105 and f/1.4 50mm.

(NB. if you want to practice a little, we’re playing in February…!)

Edit: I changed the title of this entry to something a little more representative of the content.

According to iNetCore (via Trefor Davies’ blog) the IPv4 address space will finally be exhausted on 5th September 2011.

Available IPv4 address space dropped below 10% yesterday 19th January 2010 as announced by the Number Resource Organization. So, everyone ready to take IPv6 seriously now? 😛

(To be honest it sounds like a good excuse for an ‘end of the world’ type of party – anyone in Hollywood fancy making a disaster movie out of it?!)

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