Health and Photo Course

Thursday I had to visit the dentist in Knutsford to have a broken filling replaced. It needed a jab, so no pain at all. Called in at Booth's supermarket before coming home, they have an amazing selection of bottled beers and Jan thought they would help numb the pain. I didn't like to say there wasn't any! Stocked up with Dent T'Owd Tup, one of my favourites, and another 6 different beers.

Today I had acupuncture and massage on my bad back to keep me going for another few weeks. Walked up Eccles Pike this evening, fourth time this week, just 3 miles and 600 feet of ascent, so good exercise for the end of the day. I also walked 12 miles on Wednesday to Buxton and back, for a day in Gallery in the Gardens. 

Trying to build up the miles ready for finishing the Coast to Coast walk in August with good friend Al. Then in September walking the first part of the Alpine Pass Route, with Jan, Rob, Annie and Phil (we all did part 2 from Grindelwald to Montreux in 2006) from just south of Zurich to Grindelwald in Switzerland. 

Just booked a trip to Berlin for next month, lots to photograph there and 3 full days will give us a good chance of covering the most important views. The locations are spread out so I'm sure we'll do lots of walking there too. It will be our first overseas trip this year.

We have quite a few courses to run in the next few weeks as well as 3 shows, the first in Henley starting on Friday, and 2 in Buxton. This used to be a quieter time of year, not any more!

Heard at the start of the month that the Focus on Imaging show has been cancelled. This years was the last one. That's the end of an era. I guess it means we can go skiing later in the winter, rather than always going in January so that I have time to prepare darkroom prints for the stand display in February. We will miss not seeing everyone once a year too. We have made so many friends over the years at this show I think that's what I will miss the most.

Focus on Imaging Day 1

The first day of Focus on Imaging is over. My new City Light book was officially launched. We saw lots of old friends and met many new ones.

I took some photos on my mobile of the stand before the show started and expected to do this post shortly afterwards. We were busy from the start so just finding the time now at almost midnight.

Still 3 days to go. We are on the Ilford Photo stand C2 hall 9 at the Birmingham NEC. Discounts on books and courses. Ilford/Harman have big show discounts on film, paper and inkjet media if you can get down here. Also a new low priced pinhole camera, obscura, as well as the Titan pair of pinholes for 5x4 and 10 x 8 in.

There is even a full blown darkroom with a film processing machine, an enlarger and a paper processor.

Staying with good friends Peter and Sally and their family in Kenilworth. Lot more enjoyable than the normal NEC show!

City Light Book at Loop Printers

My new book City Light was at the printers in Sheffield, Loop Print, today. They also printed my last book Lake Light.

Here are a few shots. Jan and I went over to check the first 2 sheets of pages as they came off.

Trevor the printer (featured in the shots below) had a bit of work to do to give us the blacks and contrast that we wanted. It was looking good after he worked his magic.

Should be finished tomorrow. Then it goes to binders. We should take delivery Wednesday or Thursday next week.

The launch will be on the Ilford Photo stand C2 Hall 9 at the Focus on Imaging show at the Birmingham NEC, Sunday 3rd to Wednesday 6th March.

Just arrived in Market Deeping near Peterborough to give lecture tonight. Lecture in Bury tomorrow.

City Light - Cities of the World and Buxton, New Book

I have just sent back what I think are the final edits to my new book, City Light - Cities of the World and Buxton.

It should go to the printers later this week and be ready for launch at Focus on Imaging at the Birmingham NEC from 3rd to 6th March.

Ilford Photo / Harman Technology have once again invited Jan and I to join them on their stand at the show, which is open to both trade and retail visitors. The stand number is C2 in Hall 9.

There are 31 cities and 123 images in 80 pages, as well as an article on city and night photography and technical data on every image. The cover price is £15 but there will be an introductory show offer for visitors for the 4 days of the Focus show.

Come to the show if you are able to and say hello and look at my new book. We can take cards and cash!

We will put it on the web site as soon as we can after it is printed and on Amazon Marketplace.

The photographs were taken over 22 years, hope you like them.

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.

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.

Focus on Imaging is Over for Another Year

The big photo and imaging show Focus on Imaging, at the NEC Birmingham, is over for another year. We made it home by 8.30pm last night having gone down on Saturday to set up. This year we were back with our friends on the Harman Technology / Ilford Photo stand who kindly gave Jan and I space for a display of Lake District photos and to sell my books and courses. We also launched Lake Light, my third book, this time on the Lake District.

We saw lots of old friends and met many new ones but now it's back to ship a few web orders and go in the darkroom to print some photographs. I'm in the Gallery in Buxton tomorrow so will get some exercise walking the 12 miles there and back. Saturday it's up to the Lakes before running a 3 day course meeting up  Sunday evening then Monday to Wednesday photography. Fingers crossed for good weather!

Great day here in the Peak District, blue sky and white fluffy clouds but cold out of the sun, about 8C. I can still see small patches of snow on Combs Moss, the hill I can see out of the window from my desk.

Focus on Imaging

Just had a very nice meal and evening with our good friends Peter and Sally Moore and winding down ready for tomorrow.

The Focus on Imaging exhibition is about to start tomorrow at 10 am at the NEC Birmingham. I'm on the Ilford Photo side of the Harman Technology stand C2.

My new book on the Lake District, Lake Light - The Lake District Photography of Dave Butcher is launched on Sunday 7th March at 10am. I have offers on all of my books. For the 4 days of the show Lake Light is £12, Peak Light and High Light are £10 each. If you buy all 3 they cost £30, RRP for all three is £42,98.

The stand is all set up ready to go tomorrow. There is a small display of pictures from Lake Light hand printed on Ilford Multigrade FB archival silver gelatin paper and a picture from one of my digital files from a negative scan printed by the Ilford printing service on multigrade RC silver gelatin paper.

Come by for a chat if you are able to. Dave

Lake Light Published

Lake Light - The Lake District Photography of Dave Butcher is now available.

The printers delivered all 1500 copies this morning. Orders already received have been shipped. The official launch is at the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC Birmingham, the largest annual photography and imaging show in Europe. We go down tomorrow to set up. The show runs from Sunday to Wednesday. Jan and I are on the Ilford Photo side of the Harman Technology stand C2 (near the entrance to Hall 9). I will be doing 4 days of book signing and talking about my courses and the £1000 competition that I'm running with Harman and B+W Photography magazine (in the current March issue). Hope to see some of you there. Dave

Lake Light Print Run

Yesterday afternoon I heard that Lake Light was going to be printed this morning so I had an early start to drive the 27 miles across to South Yorkshire Printers in Sheffield for 8.30pm. I was there in good time despite the traffic and then watched the first plate be printed. This was printing 4 pages from the book. Right from the start print quality was pretty good and with a few minor tweaks was even better.

I gave the go ahead and 15 minutes later 1500 copies were finished and in a stack on the floor to await printing the reverse face when the ink had dried. The plan is to print today and tomorrow and Saturday if needed. The cover was also being printed and this looked good too. After printing it will be lacquered to a high gloss before it can be bound.

The binding is done by another company so I'm unlikely to receive copies until the end of next week. I was hoping to have for Wednesday 3rd so that I could take them to my next camera club lecture to Chapel-en-le-Frith Camera Club.

Can't wait to see the final books and start selling them at Focus on Imaging at the NEC.

More Snow here in the Peak District

It's snowing again as I look out of the office window. There is about 3 inches everywhere, no wind so it's just coming straight down and not being blown around.

Swapped our 7 year old Toyota RAV 4 for a 3 month old ex-demo Nissan Pathfinder on Wednesday. It has 7 seats so we can now use just 1 car for courses, it is also considerably larger inside so has more space for our exhibition stand stuff for when we do shows. Then Thursday we used it to go to Melbourne, the one just south of Derby rather than the one in Australia, where I gave a lecture. It was snowing as we drove over the Peak District. On the way home all well until about 10 miles north of Ashbourne heading for Buxton, the road was blocked by an accident (the road was covered by snow but underneath was black ice - very slippery). We turned round and returned to Ashbourne for fuel, all garages shut so on to Derby then returned to Ashbourne. Another accident on the A52 had blocked the road since we came through so we sat there for over a half hour (now 1.30 am). Then traffic reports on the sat nav showed the A6 blocked by another accident near Buxton so we decided to try returning through Leek and Macclesfield, which was fine. Just the 4 hours to do a 1.5h journey, arriving home at 3am! The car was rock solid on some very dodgy roads, a good test for the 4 wheel drive. Needless to say I decided to drive into the Buxton Gallery a few hours later rather than walking since I have to get up at 6am if I'm walking to give me time to do my stretches for my bad back and I need more than 2.5h sleep!

It's been trying to snow on and off for several days now but today we have had 3 or 4 inches and the hills look great. It's stopped snowing and it's brightening up.

Don't forget, Focus on Imaging at the NEC Birmingham starts in exactly 2 weeks time - Sunday 7th March. I will be on the Harman Technology stand near the entrance to Hall 9 doing the launch and signing of my new book Lake Light. Hope to see some of you there. Dave Butcher

Lake Light Edits

Well, I'm not quite sure how we got there but I've just sent off version 10 of Lake Light to the Designer, Andy. I have seen 4 or 5 versions so I think Andy must have generated a few in-house and not sent them to me.

Mostly this was checking picture captions and plate numbers and the foreword by Joe Cornish. There are 88 images in Lake Light so pretty close to the number in Peak Light (90).

Will have to carefully check the edits on this lot and will be the first time since the first proof that the numbering should be correct. Not long now. Launch date is Sunday 7th March at the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC Birmingham. Getting impatient to have finished and on sale; I've been working on it for so long now.

Had some snow here today. Just a dusting, nothing serious. Walking to Buxton tomorrow for a day in the Gallery in Pavilion Gardens so hope the weather is reasonable for that.

Lake Light 3rd Proof

I sent off the edited version of the 3rd proof of Lake Light last night. It's pretty much done and, with a couple of minor edits, will be sent to Joe Cornish so that he can write the foreword.
Cover design is done too.

As we are moving forward so well and the launch date is getting closer we have added Lake Light to the Books page on the web site. If you would like a copy you can now order it by paying £15 (post free worldwide).
It will be shipped when available (late Feb/early March) in the order in which orders are received.
Encouragingly, I already have several orders.
The official launch will be at the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC 7th to 10th March but we should have the book a week or so before this so those ordering early will receive their signed copies of Lake Light before anyone else.

With the new layout it looks like there will be 88 or 89 photographs in the book. For a long time it looked like it would be 85 but Andy changed the layout and needed more images to make it work.
Dave Butcher

Lake Light Book Image Scans Complete

Finished the last couple of scans for my Lake Light book today and edited a couple of images, including that for the book cover. We have about 140 images on our short-list from which to choose the 90 images for the book. Andy from 10th Planet Design in Sheffield completed the page and cover designs a couple of weeks ago, it will have a different look to previous books but with the same overall size, 80 pages and a price of £14.99. All on schedule for a March launch.

Had a meeting with Steven Brierley and Graham Walters of Harman Technology about the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC in March. Jan and I will be there on the Ilford black and white part of their stand. Lake Light will be launched there and I will be book signing from the first day of the show, Sunday 7th to the last, Wednesday 10th March 2010. There will also be an exhibition of prints from the book on the Harman stand.

Dropped off 97 roll films for processing with Neil Hibbs today. He runs the Harman Technology processing lab and they have a new professional service for films. I should have them back next week and will keep fingers crossed that all is well until I receive the processed negatives. These are all the films from my first ever trip to Scandinavia. Only the second time I have trusted the processing of my films to anyone else!
Dave Butcher