This being my first wedding for a while (I’ve stopped doing weddings as I prepare for my own), I was horrified to find out 3 days before the wedding that I had only got one camera film left, so it was a hasty scrabble to get some spares. It’s sad that getting black and white film is no longer as easy as walking into a high street shop. So that was the first minor mishap – the other one was that I found that the head of my monopod had a crack. Not wanting it to fail in the middle of the wedding I put it under a stress test (i.e. I shook it and twisted it a bit) and lo and behold it fell apart. Bit of a shame, but in the end I didn’t really need it anyway.

I’ve talked previously about the weight of the Nikon D700 and all of my other kit at weddings, so decided this time to weigh the kit that I carry at a wedding. 10 kilograms. That’s 2 DSLR bodies, 1 film SLR body, 5 lenses, 2 flashes, 16 AA batteries, 4 DSLR batteries plus a few odds and ends. Carrying that around with me means that weddings are basically a workout!

But back to the wedding and the photos – it was a great day and lovely to share it with Clare + Pete. Only 2 to go before my own!

The weather wasn’t all sunny…in fact there was quite a bit of dullness and rain, but Penhurst is so beautiful, no matter what the weather is like. We had a chilly picnic on the beach at Norman’s Bay one day, and a soggy walk up Tent Hill on another as well as a drizzly sunrise service on Easter Sunday. The rest of the time it was great to just hang out at the retreat centre.

Whilst there, I took the opportunity to take some photos of some of the rooms, trying out my new Nikon D5100. Well…to state the obvious, it’s not my D50 and it’s certainly not my D700. Although the spec is higher than the D50 that I’ve loved for the last 6 years (more megapixels, a video mode, higher ISO settings and live-view), it feels a lot more amateurish. I can’t change timer mode to use a remote or ISO or white balance any more without digging into a menu and there’s no LCD screen on top to give me a quick view of settings. It might just be me getting used to the controls, but I would prefer the above functions instead of the ability to switch to “colour sketch” mode easily or flip out the back screen. I’m not complaining, after all this is a fantastic starter DSLR, but it’s not quite delivering for me in the usability stakes!

Anyway, back to the weekend – view a gallery of the photos taken this Easter

And the next year? Well I have a couple of weddings that I’m taking photos at before my wedding in September, then my own wedding (which I’m not photographing – my good friend and great photographer Tom Dauben is doing the honours), then another booked afterwards. I’ll not speculate what might happen to the business after that; getting married will be a major change and will most definitely take priority. But for now – roll on the 5 year celebrations!

My brother and his wife are going on safari as part of their honeymoon this summer and they came to me to ask advice about cameras to take. Now they’re starting with a blank sheet – they own a compact digital between them as well as having cameras on their phones, but they’re looking for something for safari. Now if I were going on safari, I’d be tempted to take my DSLR kit, but they’re budget (and requirements) are different. Well, here’s what I told them.

Your main requirement with safari will be zoom, coupled with not wanting to change lenses (as you might miss a shot while you’re doing that). I would say that weight and bulk will also be a factor and considering this, I think that a digital SLR would actually probably be a bit too much to handle in this situation, as to get a good long zoom, you would need a whacking great heavy lens (which themselves would cost around £500 probably – zooms are expensive). Instead, I would actually recommend sticking with a compact, or a half-way house camera. Below are some preliminary suggestions for the half-way house ones – I’ve chosen Jessops as the website purely because their descriptions of cameras are pretty good (click on the description tab on the right) – I wouldn’t necessarily buy from them though!

It’s worth considering when looking at the price that you will need to buy a good camera bag, it may not include battery and charger and also what type of memory card it takes (some are cheaper than others). With a long zoom, you’ll also need stability (as a tiny movement of the camera turns into a massive movement in the picture), so I would suggest buying a small beanbag (something like this beanbag) to rest the camera on when you take photos

• Panasonic Lumix – this is a great brand product with a good quality lens, image stabilisation and a 25-600mm lens (just for contrast, the longest lens I’ve got for my SLR is 200mm, and that lens cost me £600!)
• Olympus SZ – this again has a great zoom (25-600mm)
• Nikon Coolpix – this is one of the two big boys of digital SLR photography in terms of branding, so the technology will be good. The zoom is 22.5–585mm and again this has image stabilisation
• Canon Powershot – this is the other big boy. Slightly smaller zoom (25-500mm) but image stabilisation again.
• Sony Cybershot – this has a massive zoom (27-810mm), it’s got GPS (so you can see where pictures were taken) and image stabilisation

If these are out of your price range, there are other options in terms of compact cameras which will be almost as good…but just not quite as much zoom!

Does anyone else have any other suggestions for good safari cameras? Oh, and by the way, I do realise that the lynx is not normally found on safari, but it’s the only “wild” animal photo that I’ve taken. Believe it or not, when I went on safari in 2003 I wasn’t massively into photography!

Whilst on holiday, I spent a bit of time experimenting with night photos on the beach. To cut a long story short, if you have a Seculine Twin R3-UT camera remote and a Nikon D700 and you want to take a bulb shot of more than 30 seconds, you need to use the little cable that connects the remote to the camera. Mine was in London. The couple of experiments (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) that didn’t turn out to be totally black were taken with a finger on the shutter button whilst holding the tripod. Not great results, but that will teach me for forgetting equipment! As for the composition – it was a very misty night and we couldn’t actually see where the sea was, but we knew from tide tables that it was on its way in!

The other photography lesson that I learned on holiday (aside from remembering to take all necessary equipment) is that dusk shots are amazing at showing up dust on your sensor! It must be the long exposures coupled with the tiny apertures that shows up the dust spots a lot, but with this dusk photo I had to spend a bit of time cleaning up the photo afterwards – something I’m not a fan of doing. Time to go and get my sensor professionally cleaned!

Gallery of photos taken in and around St Davids on holiday

I fear that I maybe went a little snap-happy as I haven’t been on a photo walk for a while and it was such amazing light. None of the photos capture the full beauty of God’s creation that was on show, but hopefully it’s a small glimpse.

We then spent a day with a couple of really close friends in Birmingham where we had a walk in a slightly less snowy landscape, and I missed a cracking opportunity to take a photo of a pheasant in flight. Followed by a great game of Citadels, it was a cracking long weekend in general.

Gallery of photos taken in Birmingham and Oxford

If any of you are interested in purchasing a Canon A-series camera, then feel free to bid on the items on eBay!

• Canon AE-1 with 50mm lens
• Canon AE-1 Program with 50mm lens
• Canon AL-1 (may not work…but may just need new batteries!)
• Canon AV-1 with 50mm, 80-200mm lenses and Cobra 160 flash

Happy bidding!

• Buying a 3d lens for my film cameras and learning about stereoscopic photography
• Taking 3d photos at 4 weddings and receiving feedback
• Going old school with a digital camera and a lightmeter
• Playing around with creating anaglyph images from the stereoscopic images
• Seeing the return of 3d films at the cinema
• Seeing 3d tv coming to the high street
• Trying to source lenticular prints (3d prints without the glasses)
• Buying a 3d digital camera (Fujifilm W1)
• Writing a script to split a “.mpo” 3d digital file into anaglyph and stereoscopic “.jpeg” images

So it may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you that I’ve decided to take a break from 3d. It’s just not advancing at the speed that I thought it would, and actually I don’t think 3d is appropriate in all situations. Certainly at weddings I’ve just found it to be a bit of a distraction to have my 3d camera with me, and actually, I’m not convinced that 3d photos give much more than standard wedding photos. Couple this with the fact that you have to be close to your subject to get the best 3d effect, it’s all a bit intrusive for not much gain. 3d doesn’t work particularly well for landscape photos, and I don’t really do much in the way of portrait or still life work…so it’s kind of the end of the 3d journey for me.

I definitely think that 3d video is going to be big (well, it’s already getting that way), but I’m going to bow out of the 3d photography world for now. Keep an eye on eBay in the coming weeks for a Fujifilm W1, and do bid for it (if you haven’t been put off by the previous paragraph!)

My driving licence needs a new photo as I’ve had my current one for 10 years. So…simply find a photo machine and have the photos taken. Here lies the first annoyance; there doesn’t appear to be anywhere that I can get a list of locations of said photo machines. This would not have been a problem in the age where every underground station and Boots had a photo booth, but that time has passed, and now they are tough to find. Eventually I located one at a nearby Tesco…with a dime (yes, a dime…not even a penny) wedged in the coin slot, rendering it useless. The customer services personnel had no interest in getting it fixed. And so to Victoria Station.

At Victoria Station I located a machine which immediately demanded my £5 which I duly provided. Upon choosing the option for 5 photographs to be taken, it once again demanded that I provide £5. A little perturbed, and indignant, I looked for an option to cancel and start again, or even get my money back. Nada. Zilch. Nothing. No option. With a choice to call Camden Management Services, complain about poor user interface design and wait for a response on a Sunday afternoon whilst lamenting my money…or the option of feeding more money in, I chose the latter.

£10 for 5 passport size photos? In future I’ll be doing them myself.

The light down in East Sussex this winter was so beautiful and although I was a little disappointed by the lack of snow, I soon got over it and was able to appreciate the warm afternoon glows (even if it was a little chilly).

View gallery of Christmas photos

In other news, I’m aware that I haven’t been blogging here regularly…in fact there’s been a bit of a gap between blog posts. This is partially due to my time being taken up with my wedding planning for next year, but also because I’ve been re-writing our church website (stmarkskennington.org) in my spare time.

Have a happy New Year and I’ll try to blog a little more in 2012!