Danni and I made the trip back to Canada to visit my Dad and his family for a few weeks.  Dad has been fighting cancer for a couple of years now and it’s gotten to a state now where he’s too unwell to travel, so he wouldn’t be able to make it to our wedding.  This was just a chance for him and the rest of his family to meet my fiancée before she becomes my wife.

For some reason I had quite a bit of room in my luggage so I decided to take some lighting gear and get a few family portraits done as we don’t have anything like that on my dad’s side.  This first shot if almost the whole family, less the eldest of my dad’s youngest sons Evan who was away for work unfortunately and my brothers girlfriend Holly.

If you’re interested in seeing a few more shots (clearly you’re family), you can find them in the gallery here.

This was long overdue.

Having been the driving force behind last years Kevtoberfest, my good friend Robert deserved repayment in kind.  A Facebook group was set up in mid-May which kicked off the planning for Roberts underwater themed, 2 months premature surprise birthday party of 2011!

With the guile of a half crazed fox, I managed to lure him from the comforts of his Covent Garden flat to attend Hyper Japan with me while Elaine, Elizabeth, Victoria, Brian and Tim transformed  the flat into a living aquarium.

Not everything went smoothly on the day of distraction however.  The queue for the event seemed so impossibly long that I was quickly wracking my brain for ways to carry on my ruse for another 4 hours until it was safe to return to central London.  We killed an hour at a nearby Pizza Express by which point the line for entry seemed more manageable and we were inside after another hour.

I had already formulated a plan which would have me returning on the Tube with him to Covent Garden at the end of the day.  Danni and I were meeting some friends for dinner at one of the near by restaurants and I would just accompany him to he station at which point we’d head our separate ways.  I needed one final distraction so I could beat him back to his place which was only a few minutes walk from the station.

I’d asked Victoria to text him requesting something from the shop on his way home which would buy me the time I needed to get ahead of him.  She sent the message as we left the event and I watched him like a hawk to make sure that he’d gotten the text, but he didn’t bother to check his phone once on the 15 minute walk to Earls Court.  Sitting on the train, deep underground with no reception I had to think fast.  I began to complain about how my phone is bad at organizing apps and asked if his was any better.  Never one to pass up the opportunity to show off the powers of one of his many apple products, he demonstrated the features of his phone and I noticed as he was about to put the phone away he got the day-saving message.  As he stopped into the shop to pick up the desperately required bananas for Vic, I sprinted ahead and beat him home with plenty of time to spare.

So much effort went into planning and executing this party, so thanks everyone who helped out.  Elaine for the brilliant fish decorations and our inflatable shark friend, Alex for somehow managing to get 50 fully inflated helium balloons into a taxi and across London, Elizabeth for the hours of underwater themed music, Tim for our fishy themed snacks (who knew fish fingers were so well loved?) and of course Brian for making sure the bar was appropriately stocked.  And thanks to everyone who showed up early to help decorate, the place couldn’t have looked any better!

There are a few more images from the evening in the gallery, and here’s a link to the image I created for the shirts & magazine cover created for the night.

So, this year was my second attempt (first attempt here) at an all night photo shoot throughout the streets of London.  The plan was to all meet up on one of the shortest nights of the year, stay up all night and end up at Westminster bridge to try and recreate a few of the iconic images seen in the opening sequences of the film 28 Days Later.

We all met up around 7:30 (baring a few stragglers) on the south side of Tower Bridge for a few sunset photo opportunities.  As I have about 200 images of Tower Bridge already, I took a couple of snaps and then spent most of my time chatting with the other folks.

After everyone arrived, I set up a couple of lights and made everyone pose for a big group photo before we started our slow trek to Westminster.

The POTN Gang
L to R: Matt, Steve, Brett, Paul, Neal, Angus, Bonnie, Scott, Me

Our walk took us from Tower Bridge to Westminster Bridge via the Gherkin, Bank, St. Pauls, Smithfields and Holburn before finally catching a bus from the Strand for our final leg of the journey.  We were running short on time to catch sunrise at Westminster, so we’ll plan a bit better next year I think.

While the sunrise we had wasn’t brilliant, it did provide some terrific light at Westminster which enabled me to get the photo I’d had in my head for a few days prior to the outing.

We were expecting the area to be completely quiet, but London being the city is it there was still a fair amount of traffic and quite a few people heading home from a long night out at 4:30 in the morning.  Still, there were few enough people that we got the shots we wanted without having to photoshop anyone out of the scene.

Definitely a great night out and worth the red bull shakes I had the following day.

As always, there are a few more shots in the gallery.

My new friend and fellow photo enthusiast Ted Chan invited me along to a party he was shooting as part of his bid to take over the world efforts to expand his photographic knowledge.  As I hadn’t known Ted for very long and as we’d only ever spoken about shooting when we did see each other, I made the rather embarrassing mistake of assuming Ted was inviting me along to help him shoot the event.

This was not the case.

Fortunately, he was a really good sport about it all and cleared things with the promoter so that I was allowed to help cover the event (given that I’d brought along the heavy camera gear anyway, I was thankful).

The event itself was put on by a promotions company, who from what I gather have done quite a few of these events in the past and they’ve always been very successful.  This one was sold out when I checked the website almost a month before it was to be put on.

Obviously, I’ve gone with a very different processing style for these images.  I processed them all normally, but I just didn’t think it really fit.  Something a bit more vintage was in order.  It may be a little over done on the grain, but I was happy with the results overall.

The costumes there were amazing and everyone was really keen to get their photos done.  I even had quite a few people grab me as I walked past asking to have their photos done.  Which was ideal given my usual crippling shyness in asking people if it’s ok for me to take their photos…

There are a few more vintage images in the gallery here, and the images are duplicated here without the extreme processing.

A friend had organized another Trash the Dress shoot, this time to take place in central London near Tower Hill. In the end, the wedding dress that was brought along was far too large for our ‘bride’, so we went with a backup cocktail style dress and some kooky wellies.

It was mostly just an exercise in using some off camera lighting as well as working with a model (something I need a lot of practice with!).

These were all shot within 5 minutes walking distance of my old flat, so it was nice to be back in the neighbourhood again.  I miss it out there.  It was nice being able to be a bit of a tour guide instead of wandering around aimlessly for once though.

There are a few more shots of Marina in the photo gallery.