Friday 30 March 2012

St Michaels Mount Photos

Having travelled all the way to Bristol to give a lecture last night we had already decided to travel on to Cornwall. So here we are in St Ives!

This afternoon we arrived and it was completely overcast, no decent light for pictures at all! On checking the weather forecast it showed the south coast as sunny, just 7 miles away, so that's where we went. It was sunny too.

Ran off 3 rolls of Ilford FP4 (30 shots) of St Michaels Mount and Marazion (near Penzance). Waited a couple of hours for the tide to come in so that I could take shots of the stone causeway part-covered by the sea, with St Michaels Mount in the background. Used a dark yellow filter to darken the little bits of blue sky and emphasise the clouds. An orange would have risked losing shadow detail on the hillside.

Then it was time for food. A quick Google for best real ale pub in Marazion turned up the Kings Arms so this was where we went. Good little pub and the St Austell HSD was on good form, as was the rib-eye steak.

Tomorrow the forecast is for cloud all day. No good for the planned photos. Could be a good day to go for a walk!

Tuesday 27 March 2012

Landscape Photography Course - Northumberland in April

There are still 2 places available on the Landscape Photography course that we are running in Northumberland in April. The dates are Monday 16th to Wednesday 18th April. We meet at the Cobbled Yard Hotel in Berwick on Tweed (TD15 1DJ).

Day 1 is spent in Berwick and the coast to the north (just in Scotland), including Coldingham Bay and the pretty fishing villages of Eyemouth and St Abbs.

Day 2 will be on the island of Lindisfarne with castle, lime kilns, harbour and boats, priory, sand dunes, etc.

Day 3 is around Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh castles and the coast around them, which includes sand dunes, rocky pools and round boulders on the shoreline.

There will also be time for night photography around the old town of Berwick on one or two of the evenings.

The group will be limited to just 5 people with 2 tutors, me and my wife Jan. Suitable for digital and film camera users. The cost is £375 for 3 days tuition in lots of stunning locations and we do all the driving once you arrive.

See my web site for more details: www.davebutcher.co.uk

Wednesday 21 March 2012

In Bed at Haddon Hall

We set up our stand in the State Bedroom at Haddon Hall today. What a place, a medieval manor that is largely unmodernised. There is also no heating so we will probably need thermal underwear for the show at the weekend!

It opens at 10am Saturday. Here is a photo of the stand from today. You may notice that the bed has been removed from the State Bedroom. Loads of room for the stand but not much chance of a nap!



Monday 19 March 2012

Haddon Hall Spring Showcase

We are getting ready for our first art and designer craft show of this year.

It's the Spring Showcase of Peak District Artisans at Haddon Hall between Bakewell and Matlock.

We set up our stand on Wednesday and the show is on Saturday and Sunday.

We will have quite a few new originals and silver prints. There will also be 37 other artists exhibiting, some of the most talented in the Peak District so lots to see and all high quality.

I've been struggling with my bad back today, it's been letting me know I'm overdoing it. Too much time spent in front of my computer scanning and editing new images.

Hope to see you at the weekend.

Tuesday 13 March 2012

St Neots Here We Come!

Jan is driving us down south as I am giving lecture to St Neots Camera Club tonight. The lecture is Lake Light, 7.30pm start at the Bowling Club. It includes photos of Chicago, New York, Lake District, Dutch windmills, Hamburg, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Utah, Colorado.

Come along if you're able to.

We used to live in Sandy just south of St Neots when we first got married. So it is familiar and interesting to see the changes.

Jolly nice day here in Peak District. Hope it holds for photo course we are running here on Saturday.

Thursday 8 March 2012

Focus on Imaging 2012

Focus on Imaging is over for another year. It was good to see so many friends old and new at the show. We hadn't exhibited for 2 years so it had been a while.

Ilford Photo / Harman Technology kindly invited us back on their stand for the 5th time in 7 years and gave us a lot of space to display photos and sell books and courses. We are very grateful to them for this generous support. They also printed my poster of show offers as well as generating QR bar codes for my web site. I hadn't even considered these as useful until this show. For example, I took a photo of the stand on my mobile phone which included the QR code as a small part of the picture. The phone immediately told me it had found and recognised the bar code to my web site link and would I like to click the link. It was very fast and more importantly it worked, going straight to my web site home page! I will use these at shows throughout the year to help customers look at my web site.

Jan took these 2 photos of the stand one morning before the show started. The QR code is on the end of the counter next to where I am standing.


This one shows my shot of St Paul's from Millennium Bridge London printed at 1 metre by 0.5 metres by Ilford Lab Direct from my negative scan.



The show was good for us, we sold lots of books and some courses.  The low price for books certainly made a difference but don't expect this all the time! We needed to make some space for the new book, City Light, which will be available from February 2013 and officially launched at Focus 2013.


We actually packed up and were away from the NEC by 6.20pm. Jan went for the car when the show finished and for some reason the security gates were open so Jan just drove straight through and up to the back door of the show. Couldn't have been easier. Home by 9pm, including a take-away! Last bit of the drive it was snowing.

Saturday 3 March 2012

Focus on Imaging Setup Day

Jan is just driving us down to the NEC at Birmingham for the Focus on Imaging show http://www.focus-on-imaging.co.uk . We are setting up our part of the Ilford Photo stand. They have generously given us space for 7 large framed hand prints and space to sell books and courses.

The show opens tomorrow 4th and ends 7th March. If you're coming along visit us on C2.

Staying with good friends Peter and Sally in Kenilworth which we are really looking forward to.

Thursday 1 March 2012

New Home for www.davebutcher.co.uk Web Site

We have moved my web site from UK2 to Pipe Ten on the recommendation of Andy, who built and looks after the maintenance of my site.

Over the last year or so we have had a lot of problems with the site being unavailable and UK2 admitted it was the age of the server that was at fault. Working through the options we decided to move it for improved reliability and better customer service.

The move was done yesterday without any down-time. We are just ironing out out some teething problems with the way it displays and expect it to be fully working shortly.

All of our emails were moved too, including the old davebutcher.net ones which mostly seem to be used by spammers! We are pretty sure all emails are working properly. If you have any problems use mono@davebutcher.co.uk to let me know or a message through Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin if all else fails!

I hope you haven't been inconvenienced by the move but we are looking forward to greater reliability from now onwards.

Dave Butcher