It was almost a year and a half ago now when my hosting company upgraded a few things on the backend of my server.  One of their upgrades was to force a new version of WordPress (the blogging software I use here) which broke a lot of the customizations I had made to the old version.  It was largely my own fault as I was making changes to the core of the program and not the templating system that they’d intended users to modify.

The most annoying (and difficult) things that broke was the fact that the site menu structure (the red bar on the right there) had disappeared from the gallery making navigation a pain in that area.  This site uses a combination of the aforementioned WordPress for the framework and Gallery 2 for the photo gallery (and a plug-in called WPG2 to glue the two together).  Using a standard WordPress template will nicely integrate the gallery into WordPress, but not the other way around so I had to do some tinkering to get the WordPress menus to show up correctly while browsing the gallery.

Long story short, the WordPress menu is now available throughout the site and I’m rather pleased about that.  Also, WordPress upgrades should no longer break anything.  I hope.

I haven’t posted many fencing photos in quite a while, but I’m still taking a lot.  They’re now being posted over at my clubs website in the gallery there.

As part of the website creation process for my fencing clubs new site I’ve taken several head shots of the coaches.  It’s the first time I’ve used a 3 light setup (having just picked up another 580 EX II while back home), and it wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting.  I think the trick is just to add one light at a time until everything looks the way you’d imagined.  The setup shot is here, where the tripod in the middle is where I had the subject stand.

In this case I wanted to use the colour of the walls in our gym to add a warm, orange-ish background and use a fairly fast shutter speed to kill any ambiant light and make the rest of the image darker.  In this way I could get an orange/black look that would match the colour scheme of the website and I’m quite happy with the results.

A couple of examples are here, and the rest are in the gallery.

With the impending launch of the Central London Fencing Club website, I’ve been taking quite a few extra photos of the action.  Partly because the new site needs some shots, but largely because I haven’t been doing as much photography as I’d like lately so it gives me an excuse.

So, there’s a few new albums of fencing shots taken over the past couple of weeks.  I’ve added the CLFC logo to them as well as my own contact details.  The reason for this is that I’ll probably just be uploading fencing shots to the gallery over at the CLFC site.  Here’s a few of my favourite shots and there are more in these galleries (1, 2, 3).

The London Roller Girls hosted the European championship tournament this past weekend with 12 teams (10 UK, 2 German) descending on Earls Court for a bit of a brawl.  Obviously we (being myself, Mitesh & Neal) were there to take some shots.

The venue was huge compared to what we’re used to, so there was lots of room to move about and the lighting was much more even.  Also, since there were so many matches to watch there was plenty of time to fool around with camera settings and get everything just right.  All of that resulted in what I feel are some of the best Roller Derby shots I’ve taken so far.

Here’s a couple of my favourites.

In addition to the usual “rest are in the gallery“, I’ve gone ahead and set up a Flickr account so that I can post a few more shots that I think derby fans (or the skaters themselves) may be interested in seeing.  Stuff that I wouldn’t normally post to my gallery in other words.  Anyways, those photos are located here.

Another great night out provided by the lovely London Rollergirls.  This time it was a double header event with the London teams hosting competitors from Leeds & Birmingham.

The final scores weren’t all that pretty for the visiting teams, but it was an entertaining evening none the less.  A couple of shots from the night, and more in the gallery!