I’m back from holidays and slogging through several hundred photos trying to obtain some sort of order from it all, so decided I’d take a break and share a picture I took before I left. My buddy Sami is selling his car, and wanted some nice pictures of it before it was gone. I couldn’t promise they’d be nice, but I said I would give it a go. I’d planned this shoot in detail using my new notebook approach and was only missing a location.

Cue an hours frenized driving around looking for somewhere interesting. It did highlight the issue that planning a shoot is all very well but if you don’t know where you are going to do it in the first place, it’s all a bit pointless.

Anyway, onto the results. I had terrible problems with the optical triggers for my Vivitars – they simply wouldn’t work reliably. Or to put it more bluntly, they were utter utter shite. One flash would constantly fire on it’s own, whilst the other only fired one time out of every five or six attempts. Clearly the optical triggers need to go, they are are no good outside of a studio. In spite of this I got the static shot I wanted. I’m not totally happy with it, but equipment failings are the main cause of this unhappiness.

The only other image I wanted to get was a car to car tracking shot – this worked less well for two key reasons;

1.) I had to push to ISO 800 to get the shutter time I wanted – this caused a lot of noise which I hate.
2.) The boot of my Ignis is not a nice place to be whilst driving over bumpy ground. I was too busy concentrating on not falling out to be able to give enough attention to the shots I was taking. I’ll share the picture here if only to illustrate my points.

Despite these problems, I’m confident my new approach to shooting cars is really helping to improve the results I’m getting. on to the next car which will depend on which of my friends I can convince to stand around for an hour whilst I mess around taking photos!

When the bartender at the airport bar says “are you still here?”  You know something has gone badly wrong with your holiday…

As I write this, I should be walking the streets of historic Venice, lapping up the culture, the sights, the architecture (and the booze).

Instead I’m sat in my dingy office at home bemoaning the state of the world. It goes something like this;

We arrive at Bristol International Airport full of that optimistic buzz you always get when you are about to go on holiday. We line up with all the other various folks either skipping and twittering, happy that they are off to sunnier and more relaxing climes – or trudging and dragging a case knowing they are going home.

Our turn at the check-in and the sloping foreheaded drone behind the counter cheerfully informs us our flight is delayed 3 hours. I refrain from speaking my mind at this point. It can’t be the weather, because when we arrived it looked like this;

5 hours pass in a haze of bad bad takeaway food, and ludicrously expensive beer and wine. For a time the weather turns towards the worrying – snowstorms hit.

But departs as quickly as it arrives. Finally we are called to our gate for boarding. Where we wait.

And wait….

And are told to wait just 15 minutes more for an announcement.

It’s hard not to notice the conspicuous arrival of airport police at the gate, just a short moment prior to the announcement. Expecting trouble are we?

So there it is, the squawking tannoy voice informs us that the flight has been canceled, because easyjet can’t find a crew for the plane. Did you look down the back of the sofa for one? Did you not realise the plane would need a crew before you called us to the gate, after making us wait FIVE HOURS? You total, total arseholes.

“Please proceed to the easyjet helpdesk for more information, and a brain aneurysm bought on through pure distilled airport rage.”

Airport rage is (thankfully) unique in that it’s on the whole utterly impotent, and pointless. The monosyllabic and infuriatingly un-apologetic cretin behind the counter doesn’t care about you – and can’t help you by virtue of being at the bottom of both the easyjet food ladder, and apparently also the gene pool.

So we find ourselves at home, and having been refunded for our entire holiday without any undue fuss or hassle, and without me needing to “express myself” on the phone to the queasyjet helpliner. We’ve re-booked and actually saved money on the re-booking. These are small, but welcome mercies.

Now I’m off to unpack my suitcase.