The First Post

The "Arrival"

As a blog virgin this is a new experience - a whole new world, with new horizons and opportunities opening up before me. So here goes……..

We collected outside the underground station with bated breath as each of us steadily arrived. Bd with his brand new lens and Katie with her new camera, collected from the post office 3 hours earlier a fully charged battery and no SD card – Bd to the rescue from somewhere in the depths of his back pack a spare SD card magically appears.

Like Bd this was only my second outing with my new camera the Canon S90. However unlike Bd I am hanging onto the view that “size doesn’t matter – it is what you do with it that counts”, and have found that the S90 is “Compact but beautifully formed”. Not for me the prospect of lugging around multiple kilos of Camera bodies, lenses, flashes, tripods……. Etc. the S90 fits neatly in my pocket enabling me to achieve the first rule of photography “have your camera with you”. For me this is key and whilst with a 200mm lens on a DSLR you can covertly photograph the nasal hair of the man across the street innocently minding his own business – this is far, far, outweighed by the benefits of being able to slip the camera away into the folds of a jacket.

To the main event – a Saturday morning in Covent Garden three weeks before Christmas. A sobering event to any grown man, BUT we are not shopping and this made all the difference.

We finished our drinks, resolved to meet up in an hour and scattered to the four corners of the garden each setting off purposefully with the aim of capturing the perfect moment………..

So…. what to capture?

The "Artistes"

The Invisible Man - Clever but not attracting the crowds

Gold staue however was a continuous draw - especially to the young and the young ladies. This girl's expression says it all.

Is this any job for a grown man - to sit in a box with face make up, pretending to be a dog ?

Whatever your views the children enjoyed it. I especially liked the way I caught the flash on the lady's camera.

Mont Martre comes to Covent Garden.

This was my favourite artist. The eyes especially came to life as he sculpted from the photo in the background.

The "Atmosphere"

A small attempt to capture the atmosphere....

The tourist

The People

The Food & the Colour

The Reindeer

The "Arty"

I did cheat here - I saw these on my way to the underground so they are not strictly "Covent Garden" - but they are very close!

The “Analysis”

We all had a good morning, Patrick Litchfield won’t lose any sleep but we all had a good go and achieved some pleasing if not earth shattering results. Luca had a couple of really nice compositions ready to show us, but I suspect that he spent his last 10 minutes photo-shopping on his laptop – and we had come out to get away from shopping! They were good shots none the less.

The morning was a great opportunity to stop and to step out of time with the express purpose of pitting yourself against, people, composition and light.

To top it all we finished with CPs – that can’t be bad.