Fringe Chaos

Every August the chaos that is the Fringe comes to Edinburgh.   Hundreds of acts descend upon the city and clog up the Royal Mile, annoying residents, but delighting photographers.   The main challenge with getting good snaps is battling your way through the crowd and finding an angle that isn't blocked by the heads of a dozen tourists.   A little rudeness pays off in these situations.   Nothing extreme of course, but it's surprising how often you'll be forgiven for pushing your way to the front and blocking someone else's view if you're carrying a big camera.   A few of my favorite Fringe snaps:

 nice wide aperture blurs the background so that the passing tourists are less distracting

The most important thing I learned from photographing the Fringe this year was to not just go to the Royal Mile once and assume I'd captured the Fringe.   Who's there and what they're doing changes every day, so go often and you never know what you might find!

Shows!

Rather than do seperate entries for each show i've been to recently I thought I'd just combine them into one big glorious review post!   The three shows I've seen over the last couple of weeks are HMS Pinafore, put on by the Edinburgh University Savoy Opera Group, the Beauty and the Beast ballet, by Northern Ballet, and Spamalot.

HMS Pinafore I found thoroughly enjoyable!   It's a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.   Having seen quite a few EUSOG performances over the past few years I have to say it compares favourably.   All the cast did a great job, sets, costumes and choreography were simple but effective, and the space onstage was used very well.   The orchestra had a couple of tiny slip ups towards the beginning, but these were barely noticeable.   The show was typical Gibert and Sullivan, full of colourful characters, incredibly catchy songs, with a suitably ridiculous twist at the end.   The script did lack some of the farcicality I have come to expect from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, but I suspect this is due to it being one of their earlier shows and they had not yet fully found their style which we know and love.   All in all, though, a very enjoyable show!   Good work!

  

Beauty and the Beast was a new ballet and I think it was a little unusual, but it was unusual done right!   The dancing was very modern in lot of respects, but not modern in a naff way where the dancers just look like they're having a spazz attack on stage!   It was thoroughly beautiful, and drove the story forward at a pretty quick pace for ballet!   The costumes and sets were very creative and very pleasing to the eye and were used very well, and there were some genuinely funny moments!   The main issue I had with it was there were a couple of places towards the beginning where the stage hands had to nip behind bits of set and fiddle about and nip off again.   Pretty unprofessional if you ask me!   They could have found a different solution to that!   Even having a member of the cast duck behind for a couple of seconds would have looked better!  And the beast did slightly look as though he was wearing bondage gear...   Something that surprised me was that it did not have its own new music.   It used various pieces of French classical music.   That's not usual is it?   I've certainly never seen that before!   But despite a few little niggles I had, it was a brilliant evening!   Highly recommended!

Spamalot is the Monty Python musical, based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.   It was what you might expect, ie. very silly!   It was interesting for someone like me who knows Holy Grail inside out and back to front to see how they had adapted it for stage.   Most of the main elements from Holy Grail's plot were kept (it had a plot??), though I was slightly disappointed about the lack of Castle Anthrax!   But other old friends like the Black Knight, Dennis and Tim all had their bit to do.   They also added in a female character by giving the Lady of the Lake an actual part in the show rather than a passing reference.   They obviously used the songs from Holy Grail and added in a few new ones, along with a rather predictable appearence of a sing-along Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.   Musically my favourite part was The Song That Goes Like This, the Lady of the Lake and Sir Galahad's lovesong.   Or rather song about lovesongs!   It has a lovely tune and the lyrics are hilarious!   I was impressed with the cast both vocally and acting wise, despite a little corpsing during the Knights Who Say Ni! scene.   But who could blame them.   Costumes were great, and so were the sets, which looked distinctly Terry Gilliamesque, although there was not a lot of scene changing.   The stage did look a bit cramped though.   They were only using a small part of it and could have done with giving themselves some more room, in my opinion.   For me the funniest aspect of the show was that they subtly brought in a lot of jokes from Monty Python's Flying Circus that only real afficionados would spot.   The topical jokes were quite funny as well.   All in all, a very funny and silly night out, and I'm glad I went to see it, but quite honestly, I don't think I would go and see it again.

Eyes

I know everyone takes pictures of eyes but I wanted to do it anyway.   Let's face it, eyes are awesome!   So much depth and colour and so very expressive. 

The first thing I learned about shooting eyes is that not just any old eye will do.   Sure, all eyes are beautiful, but a lot of people just don't seem to open theirs very wide.   While this is fine in everyday life and looks normal, in a photo I found that it just looks like i caught them mid-blink.   So I tried a few different people before I got shots I like.   The eye model I eventually settled on was my brother, who has gorgeous blue eyes with plenty of interesting detail.   The second thing I learned about shooting eyes is that you need to have a very patient eye model!   Not everybody will be happy for you let off a flash gun in their eyes repeatedly!   And who could blame them...   Finally I learned to shoot both eyes.   They're really quite different!   Here are a few of the best from this shoot:

 My brother really does have gorgeous eyes. 

And one of my eye that my model was kind enough to shoot for me.   He's not just a pretty face!

:)

Botanic Macros

So, back in August (yeah, I have quite a big backlog of photos to get through...) I waited patiently for a sunny day, and believe me, there were not many of them!   Once the elusive sunnyish day finally presented itself I took my camera (Nikon D80) and my macro lens (Tamron 90mm, f1.8) along to the botanic gardens and spent a couple of happy hours among the flowers (oooh, that rhymes!).   Now, the first thing to know about my photography is that I am very much an amateur!   Almost everything I know I taught myself.   I have never been to a class in my life, and there are only a very few things I have learned from friends.   I am still very much a learner!   Anyway, my macro lens is still relatively new and I haven't had a huge amount of practice with it yet.   Here are a few of my favorite photos from that day:

There were hoverflies EVERYWHERE that day and they were very co-operative and happy to pose for me.   I think their colours contrast very well with some of the flowers.

Quite proud of this one!   Very lucky/skillful freezing that one like that!

Unoriginal, I know, but i like it anyway.  :)

Doesn't quite captue how cool these flowers were!   They looked like black silk!

I have tried capturing montbrecia so many times and have never quite been happy with the results.   I have found capturing their fire to be surprisingly difficult.   Full sunlight definitely helped, as did getting right in among the flowers, rather than shooting from above, and also finding a plant to photograph with lots more in the background.


Things that worked during this shoot:
- The hoverflies.   They were great!   Loads of them about and not at all camera shy!
- The staff at the Botanics being very relaxed about guests getting up close and personal with the flowers.   I imagine this is far from the case in plenty of places.
- The weather.   It was worth waiting for a sunny day!

What I learned from this shoot:
- I'm never shooting in JPEG again!   I was quite shy about RAW up until then because of lack of hard drive space, but now with my shiny new computer I am a total convert!   There were so many photos I took that day that would not have been salvageable if they had been JPEG.   They would have just looked washed out.   RAW rocks!
- Wind is the enemy when taking macros.   WHY is so hard to get away from in Scotland??
- There is a very good reason why people recommend using a small aperture when shooting macros.  Sometimes very shallow depth of field works really well with macros, as it blurs the background, removing distractions, but it can also be very frustrating to take a photo and finding that only a small part of a flower or insect is in focus.


I'm so excited that Spring is now here once more!   I can't wait to use what I learned last year to get even better photos this year!     

Wooo! :D

Hello!   Welcome to my new blog!  This is my new place for posting about all the various interesting things I see, shoot, go, do, read, watch and make.   At present the aim is to make it mainly photography-based but with reviews, cooking, travel and crafts projects thrown in as well.  But we'll see how it evolves...