Cannock City Light lecture

Lecturing to Cannock Photo Soc tonight 8pm ko. http://www.darkroomdave.com/events/lecture-city-light-cannock/

Peak Light Lecture in Bury Thursday 30th October

I am lecturing to Bury Photographic Society tonight. It's my Peak Light lecture with lots of Peak District photos from my Peak Light book as well as cities, Alps and Yosemite.

Here are the details. http://www.darkroomdave.com/events/lecture-peak-light-bury/

There's no charge if you want to visit tonight, Thursday 30th October 2014!

Lecture in Coventry Tonight, Wednesday 15th October 2014, 8pm KO

I'm lecturing to the Mercia Photographic Group in Coventry tonight, starting at 8pm. It's the second time out for my new lecture City Light with the first section being from my book of the same name. After the break there is a set of pictures following the 205 miles of the Alpine Pass Route across Central Switzerland. The last section is New Zealand landscapes followed by some cities including Sydney and Hong Kong.

Here's a link to the details on my DarkroomDave website.
Their website says all welcome so if you want to come along then please do.

New Print Lecture City Light Finished

I have just finished pulling together my latest lecture. It's called City Light after my book of the same name. Lots of hints and tips throughout and explaining how I pull my pictures together.

Its a print lecture, as usual. Ilford Photo generously donated the Ilford Multigrade FB Glossy 20 x 16 inch paper for me to make the darkroom prints on. It's very expensive to do print lectures now and this sort of help makes the difference between preparing a new lecture or not. I also included a few 24 x 20 inch prints for good measure.

The first half is all cities from my City Light book. It's based on my lecture on how to photograph cities that I presented at PhotoLive in London last year with quite a lot of new prints added in.

The second half is in 2 parts, the 205 mile Alpine Pass Route in Switzerland that we hiked last year followed by New Zealand and a few Far East city views including Sydney and Hong Kong.

I made the last 5 prints yesterday and mounted, spotted and trimmed everything. This morning I finished the running order. There are 45 prints in each half, 90 in total. This is the most I have ever included in a 1.5 hour lecture. In all I used just under 300 sheets of paper, including spares, and around 18 days printing in the darkroom.

The pile of 90 prints in my City Light lecture

It's a nice feeling when a new lecture is finished and is ready to go!

All set now for the world premiere at the North Cheshire Photographic Society in Poynton on 30th September 2014!

For information, I give lectures across the UK to all sorts of clubs, so if your club would like me to visit and give one of my lectures please contact me through my website. I'm also listed in the PAGB (Photographic Alliance of Great Britain) Handbook under lecturers for LCPU and NEMPF but I will travel anywhere as long as you pay me!

PhotoLive 2013

All set up ready for the starting pistol of PhotoLive 2013 www.photo-live.com!

Expecting lots of people today for the dozens of lectures, hopefully some will come to mine!

My lectures today are.
The Art of Monochrome City Scenes, 10 to 10.45 am, room 7

The Art of Monochrome Landscapes, 3 to 3.45 pm, room 1

My stand is 3a. Here's a picture of it. Mostly books and a few pictures.
All books at much reduced prices.

PhotoLive 2013 This Weekend

The new PhotoLive 2013 event in London is fast approaching. It is being run by Future Publishing whose titles include Photography Week, Digital Camera, PhotoPlus, NPhoto and Practical Photoshop.

I am one of the 30-odd lecturers for the 2 day event, Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th October.

My lectures are 10 - 10.45am, 'The Art of Monochrome City Scenes', and 3 - 3.45pm 'The Art of Monochrome Landscapes', same lectures at the same time on both days. There are 10 to 13 lectures going on at the same time throughout the day so lots to choose from.

Use discount code SC_15 for a 15% discount on the day and weekend ticket prices. You can also buy tickets for individual lectures at £20 each.

My lectures are brand new. I'm still trying to learn my words, never easy as I refuse to use a script and generally just make it up using the prints to prompt me. Yes, even in this digital age I am still doing new print lectures from my film negatives! These have 30 prints in each. Apart from 1 poster in the city lecture all of the prints are silver gelatin darkroom prints. A lot of these are new fibre based prints made by me over the last few weeks.

The landscapes lecture is mostly illustrated with mountain photos, the city lecture mostly includes photographs from my new City Light book.

I also have stand 3A in the PhotoLive retail area. You can visit this without paying any fee at all. My landscapes books, Lake Light, Peak Light and High Light are all £5 instead of £15. City Light is £10 instead of £15. Free autograph and bag with every purchase!

I will also have details of the courses for next year, if you want to have a chat about these or private tuition.

The venue is the Novotel London West in Hammersmith.

Still time to book using the SC_15 15%-off discount code!

Hope to see you there.

Great Dome Art Fair 2013

The Great Dome Art Fair is in full swing in Buxton this weekend, 10am to 4.30pm Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st. It's also the last weekend of the Buxton Opera Festival and Fringe, so lots of other things going on.

We have a large stand with lots of new photos. Because of the large stand we also have far more prints than we usually bring to any other show, maybe approaching 600 in total. If you decide to come may be worth allowing a few minutes extra!

The show is the annual showcase for Peak District Artisans and over 60 members are here exhibiting in one of the most spectacular venues for any art and designer show, the Devonshire Dome in Buxton.

Here are some photos of the show.

Last Minute Lecture Booking Tonight

I have a late lecture booking tonight, to Chapel Camera Club. The venue is Chapel-en-le-Frith golf club, just a half mile from home! KO 8pm. All welcome.

The lecturer they had booked is having problems returning from Antarctica. Any excuse!

Title of my lecture is Travels in Monochrome. The photos were all taken between 2003 and 2005 and it's a print lecture. Starts in Colorado, then a trek I did with friends from Glasgow to Cape Wrath and finishing with the Tour of Mont Blanc. About 80 black and white darkroom prints, mostly 20 x 16 inches images.

Lecture, Walk and Pub

Gave the first lecture of 2013 today to the Royal Photographic Society Northwest Monochrome Group. Now that's what I call a snappy name!
Jolly friendly bunch. Lots of book sales too.
Home by 2pm, quick bite to eat before walking around Eccles Pike to the Old Hall Inn in Whitehough. Just the 6 real ales and 2 real ciders to choose from! I'm on Happy Valley Black Magic, a dark ale, at the moment. Jolly tasty.
It's trying to snow and dark. Better have a 2nd pint to make sure we walk home safely!

Hatfield House Living Crafts show day 1 and lecture

Busy day today. Started with opening day of Living Crafts show at Hatfield House. Lots of interest in my photos and sales to match, fortunately. It was mostly dry until mid-afternoon when there was heavy rain. Show ground is quite firm so little in the way of mud and all marquees are carpeted. Luxury.

Sunny spells and no rain forecast tomorrow and blue sky day Saturday; things are looking up!

I left the show about 3.30pm to drive to Birmingham to give lecture to Smethwick Photographic Society. Big audience, must have been 80-odd, and sold lots of books too. Now in hotel relaxing.

Drive back to Hatfield tomorrow. Hope to get there in time for show opening at 10am.

Leeds Photo Trip

We returned from visiting our friends in Leeds late Tuesday. I ran off 7 rolls of Ilford FP4 120 film but processing will have to wait a couple of weeks.

The arcades were the main event really and I took photos of 5 of them, including County, Cross, Queens, Thorntons and Grand. Didn't see any security to curtail my photography which made a pleasant change to London. Tuesday it was raining all day so only took photos on Monday.

We have 2 shows on the next 2 weekends, in fact a total of 7 days of shows, as well as a lecture.

Today we are packing up for an art and craft show at Penshurst Place near Tonbridge Wells run by ICHF. It is on for 3 days starting Saturday 5th to Monday 7th May, 9.30am to 5.30pm. We set up our stand tomorrow. For more details click this link.

Next week we set up a show at Hatfield House run by Living Crafts. I used to live in Hatfield just at the foot of the road up to Hatfield House so am looking forward to seeing some of my old haunts again. The show days are Thursday 10th to Sunday 13th May, 10am to 5pm. I am also giving a lecture on the Thursday night in Birmingham so Jan will have to run our stand alone for part of the afternoon and following morning as it's a 2 hour drive each way.

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.

Trip to the Flat Lands

I'm in Norwich tonight. Didn't need to worry about journey, no hold-ups so here in time to take some photos of castle in evening light and the old Royal Arcade shopping mall.

Then it was straight over to give a lecture to the Norwich Photo Society. Very friendly, large, chatty audience, including people from neighbouring clubs too, so the evening flew by. Sold lots of books too which makes it more worthwhile travelling this distance.

Hoping for good weather tomorrow and more photos around the city before taking the long way round so that I can take some Norfolk Broads photos to fill a gap in my picture library.

Lecture in Norwich Tuesday 19th April

I am giving a lecture in Norwich tomorrow, Tuesday 19th April. Hope the roads are clear otherwise it could be a 5 hour drive from here.

Felt awful today, I have a cough and cold. Fingers crossed I'm better later on.

Caught up with printing, including all of the contact prints of the new London negatives that I took in March. Will try and scan for adding to web in next week or so.

Will take camera and tripod to Norwich and take some photos on Wednesday if the weather is good. May also drive across to the Norfolk Broads as I don't have any shots of these.

My Blackberry is still not letting me blog reliably. It loses all of the text sometimes so for some time I have been writing the blog in a memo and copying and pasting the text across when it is deleted by the software. It also no longer synchronises with my pc Outlook diary. The last Blackberry desktop software update deleted all of my configuration settings for the 3rd time. The last 2 occasions it either deleted my diary data or duplicated every entry so I'm not going through that again. Roll on August when the contract ends and I can change it!

New Lecture in Warrington

Lake Light, my new lecture, will be presented for a second time Tuesday evening at Warrington Photographic Society. Drop by if you can. It's a mixture of cities and landscapes.

Lecture to Hoylake Photographic Society

Just on way home from Hoylake on the Wirral having given my Peak Light lecture. Very appreciative friendly audience. Looks like we will be home about midnight. That's 2 this week as I lectured to East Midlands Monochrome Group (near Northampton) Wednesday. Art Fair in Buxton this weekend. Fortunately we set up stand this afternoon so can have a lie in to 7.30am tomorrow.

April Showers in August and New Newsletter

We are having heavy showers and sunshine here in the Peak District so it is more like April than August! It's a bit chilly too when the sun isn't shining, with quite a cool breeze.

The builders have made a good mess at the side of the house. The old leaking roof is off the side part (so it leaks properly now!), walls are down and they have started putting in steel beams and brick pillars to hold everything up as well as a few new roof trusses. We should see the new roof going on this week.

I sent out a newsletter yesterday. It will be on my web site sometime next week hopefully. If you are not on the distribution and would like to see it here is the link to the archive for all my newsletters.

Just putting finishing touches to my new lecture Lake Light; 73 prints done, just a handful to go.

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

Warrington Lecture

Back from lecturing in Warrington. Jolly wet return trip. Lots of standing water and rivers running across road. Difficult to see in the dark. Seems to have eased a bit in last few minutes.

Birkenhead Lecture

Off to Birkenhead in an hour or so to give a lecture to the Birkenhead Photographic Association. Same talk as Monday night, Peak Light. Quite a nice day here so hopefully lots of people will turn to see my pictures and hear what I have to say.

Another show at the weekend coming. This time in Crowthorne near Reading. Just the 3.5 hour drive compared to the 4 hour drive to Sevenoaks last weekend. Saw quite a few Christmas shoppers last weekend and hopefully we will see more of that as we move closer to the Christmas.