Bad blood at Bletchley Park

I was very saddened to read yesterday on boingboing about the escalating rift between the Bletchley Park trust and The National Museum of Computing (TNMoC), and the former's appalling management of the latter. You can read about the story, and see TNMOC's trustees' open letter outlining their grievances here.
 
The company I work for, IP Performance Ltd, have held a number of technology events at TNMoC, and have always ended with a guided tour of the facility, led by one of the volunteers. You can read a news item write-up of one such event on the company website. 

It is these same volunteers that are being fired after years of voluntary service without notice, volunteers who not only undertake the guided tours, but also maintain and restore every single exhibit in the museum.

Unwarranted sackings, removal of collections, limiting access, surrendering editorial control of exhibits and collections to business sponsors - it's a sad and sorry state of affairs. Let's hope public outcry brings pressure to bear to force the Bletchley Park trust to reconsider its decisions.

I wrote a blog on the museum and the Bletchley Park trust's neighbouring permanent Turing exhibit on our company website - you can read it here. 

UPDATE: Please have a look at Gareth Halfacree's well-researched article on the two trusts' debacle here...

On photographing launch parties and events

When I'm not tooling around in the garden or the forest, I spend my time gainfully employed as a pre-sales consultant, working with, or writing about computer networking technology. I also get involved in new business development, web content management and design, tender responses and bid management, social media integration, graphic design, electronic marketing... the joys of a private company with a flat organisational structure and matrix management!
 
One of my business verticals is Media, and in particular TV Broadcast and Film post-production editing. Consequently, I spend much of my time at customer and partner meetings in Soho. I've usually got at least one of my cameras with me (for case studies and promotional material), and over time began to get asked to attend various events - launch parties, shows, interviews etc - and record the proceedings in stills photography (it also helped that as a company, we have supported various independent projects, such as ELBA's London Legacy 2020, and Amo Production's "Makers Our Story", a documentary on the British Independent Film Industry - see brief trailer below).

This has led to one of the more interesting facets of my photographic work - not only capturing the interview, or the pose, but also the unguarded moments. The laughter, the spontaneous arguments, the wardrobe malfunctions, the storming-out-because-my-rider's-not-been-met, the superstar's stretch limo being clamped, it's all there, ready to be snapped.

There's been a wealth of interesting moments, ranging from covering the Renderyard Film Festival in Rioja, watching the passion and animation of Leee John (ex-"Imagination") talking about his new projects as a director, to the frankly bizarre experience of listening to Patrick Murray (Mickey Pearce in "Only Fools and Horses") plugging his book on the history and proliferation of the Giant Hogweed.

  The most recent event was the FMF Show back in November, held at Archer Street, a cocktail bar and club in, wait for it... Archer Street in Soho. A celebration of fashion, media and film making, it featured a set by Chris Jones (brother of Grace), millinery from Philip Treacy, works from artist and photographer Glenn Bracke, as well as jewellery and clothing from various British designers, and worn by the FMF models.

 
Guest of honour was Grace Jones herself, along to support her brother and to perform a few songs. Fashionably late, she arrived with Philip Treacy and his entourage in a gleaming white stretch limo (and yes, that's the limo driver being ticketed in the first collage, above).

Below is a collage of various photos I took at the event - models, designers, celebs, organisers.

This type of informal snapping is probably my favourite form of people photography - just milling around, chatting, putting people at their ease, composing, framing and shooting on the fly, and every so often, getting that unguarded or unexpected moment (I always regret not having a camera at the launch of "Who's Not! 1987: The Alternative Who's Who", where I found Jeanette Charles - HR Queen Elizabeth II lookalike and impersonator - in her underwear in the coat room at Worksop Town Hall).

Interim thoughts... blogging platforms

OK, I've been using Blogger for a few days now, and have found it intuitive and easy to use... BUT... the image (photo) management options suck big-time - you get a choice of sizes, but the smaller ones are ridiculously small thumbnails, while the larger ones bust out beyond the the template frame boundaries, which make the Blog look nasty. I've had to settle for the medium-sized format, which is rather too small for the images I want to display. On the plus side, although you only get 1GB of image storage, images under 2048 x 2048 pixels don't count towards that limit, so if I keep my resolutions down, this should never be a problem (I try to keep at least one axis under 600 pxl). 

Storage apart, it seems that I'm going to have to build collages or mosaics of images, save them as a single file and upload it, if I want this Blog to look the way I want it to... a big demerit, Blogger.com! See my next post to see how well (or not) this approach works.

I shall test hyperlinks and video in the next few days... watch this space!

An experiment in infrared (IR) photography

Back in January (2013), after the snows came, I decided to put into action a photoshoot I'd planned for a while. 

I'd been toying for a while with the idea of converting one of my Canon EOS DSLR bodies to infrared - this involves removing the infrared blocking filter from the CMOS sensor and effectively turning the camera into a full-spectrum capture device (there are various options - full-spectrum - IR+UV+visible light, IR+visible light, IR-only; depending on what the IR blocking filter is replaced with). The problem is that it is fiddly work to do yourself (open-heart surgery on your precious camera), or expensive to have done, and pretty much irreversible (unless you have very deep pockets). After a lot of thought, I decided that the gimmick (of playing around with visual effects) was not worth the outlay.

Instead, I dug out an old film camera (my wife's old Pentax K1000), and loaded it with some ASA 400 IR B&W film I sourced on eBay, and purchased a suitable IR filter for the lens - oh, and not forgetting a remote shutter release cable - you need long exposures for IR photography!

Snow isn't really suited for the IR treatment, as best results are achieved by photographing subjects that reflect or radiate in the infrared spectrum - lush vegetation, clear skies; as opposed to absorbing IR (cloudy sky, bare trees, snow cover). But the scenery looked gorgeous, it had actually *stopped* snowing, and I had a spare few hours, so I grabbed my kit (including a sturdy tripod) and sallied forth.
 

These two photos are of The Church of the Holy Innocents, High Beach. The image on the left is unfiltered, shot at ASA/ISO400, f/8, 125th second. Unfiltered, it comes out pretty much identical to a standard B&W ASA400 film image (the IR spectrum will have been captured, but obliterated by the visible light). The one on the right was taken with an IR72 filter, ASA/ISO20, f/2.8-4, 1/8th second.

It takes a while to get the hang of this... you need long exposures (slow shutter speed), low ISO, wide aperture to catch as much light as possible, while blocking off all visible light with the IR72 filter. This also means you have to frame and focus without being able to see your shot through the viewfinder (you can frame and compose first without the filter, but focus in the 700-1000 nanometre spectrum is slightly offset, so long shots with a focus just dialled back from infinity seem to work best). A tripod and remote shutter cable are essential.

The results were quite interesting, although the visual effects aren't quite as stunning as I'd hoped (for the spectral absorption/reflection reasons explained above). I still have a couple of rolls stored in the fridge, and will try again when the forest is in its verdant spring glory! I found the IR gives an eerie, ghostly effect, and that brickwork and tree bark details are greatly enhanced. Here are a selection - judge for yourself:

IR72 filter, ASA/ISO20, f/2.8-4, 1/8th second

IR72 filter, ASA/ISO20, f/2.8-4, 1/8th second

 IR72 filter, ASA/ISO20, f/2.8-4, 1/8th second

With spare son for scaling. Ben's wellies seem the most solid part of him! No idea what the horizontal line in the top third of the picture is - it doesn't appear in any other images. Can anybody cast any light?

...and then it snowed...

...and snowed, and snowed, on and off for the first three months of 2013. Here are some shots of the snow on my trudge into town on the 20th Jan (Sainsburys was the goal, but I had to divert for some liquid refreshment at the Victoria Tavern en route!):

The descent into Loughton.

Some welcome respite at a local hostelry.

 

Sit in the beer garden? Nah...

The long trudge to Sainsburys.

And home, albeit via the pub next door.

And so it contued, on and off, right up until the end of March:

 

 

  But, eventually it was time to park the wellies...

...and watch it all from the warmth of *inside* the house, supping a mug of hot chocolate...

Next... and still on the winter theme - a photographic experiment...

The first 18 months

It's been a year and a half since we moved here to our little cottage in the heart of Epping Forest, and we've had the chance to see a full cycle of the changing seasons. With all the challenges of moving, unpacking and settling in, we were well into late autumn/early winter before we got much opportunity to record our surroundings - here are some of the first:

 

This one is my personal favourite from that day:

 ...but I'm happy with the rest, and the glorious autumnal colours:

And let's not forget Toby the Beagle - he's in his element here, always snuffling around, chasing deer and squirrels:

Oh yes, the squirrels... size of bloody cats around here, those bloody tree rats!

We didn't know it then, but we were about to get some snow... a lot of snow!

Intro... why I'm here

This blog is a bit of an experiment - a friend asked me to help him set up a blog, and make recommendations as to platform, features etc. Now, I've maintained the company's blog, and been a regular contributor for a few years now, but that's bespoke code on our own servers, so I really didn't have much by way of first-hand experience of Internet-hosted blogging platforms. What I did know was that Blogger and Wordpress were the most popular, and that should be where I start looking. So here I am - I will maintain a blog on both, in parallel, for a few weeks, to get the feel of them, before a) deciding which one is best suited to my purposes, and which I will maintain, and b) which one will be best suited to my friend. It may well be that the answers to a) and b) will be different, due to different blogging requirements, complexity and technical aptitude, and of course, personal preferences... we shall see.