One of the things I remember best about Christmas as a child is all of the yummy Christmas treats my mom used to make for us.  From about the end of November she would keep the kitchen in a constant state of activity and there was always something for us to help out with.  Decorating cookies, dipping chocolate cherries, washing dishes…but mostly ‘cleaning’ the icing mixers of all that pesky leftover icing.  Someone had to do it.

In an effort to get ‘into the Christmas Spirit’ and to really help Danni celebrate her first festive season, we’ve decided to renew that tradition and make ourselves fat bake all of my childhood favourites.  Last week was butter tarts and a new addition called Rocky Road Crunches.  (We’ll actually have to remake both of these this weekend as our supply has already run dry.)

This past weekend we made sugar cookies and something a bit more challenging but an all time favourite from my childhood.  The gingerbread house.

Not wanting to tackle the gingerbread house blindly, I picked up this book from Amazon last week and read all of the important bits before setting out on our confection construction.  I then spent a fair bit of time looking at gingerbread house images online to decide just how to design our first home. The book includes a design for a simple 4 walled affair, boring!    I wanted to branch out and push the limits a bit so I spent a good hour designing the templates necessary.  It was admittedly a little ambitious and would either be a great first attempt or a glorious mess of gingerbread and frosting.

I figured delicious either way, so why not go all out!

I messed up a bit on the actual gingerbread recipe by using too much flour so it was tough to roll out, but we managed after letting it warm back up to room temperature.  Patience is not easy and I’m sure as a 6 year old I wouldn’t have stood for this delay, but it was a necessary step.

One of the things I remember clearly about my mom’s gingerbread houses were the candy glass windows so I knew I had to recreate those.  There were instructions in the book on how to do it, but that involved making them separately  and gluing them in with icing after.  Certain that’s not how we did it as a child, a quick call to mom revealed the secret and we were on our way.

I really wanted to take a few photos of us doing the actual construction and decoration of our first home, but there was so much icing and powdered sugar everywhere so you’ll have to use your imagination for that part.  The final home looks like this:

Surprising 2 whole days later it looks exactly the same.  It may have something to do with the fact that I ate my weight in candy while building and decorating the house.  It turns out I still need my mom around to tell me to stop eating all of the sweets as I have the same self control my 6 year old self had when it comes to sugar.

There are a couple more photos of the house and cookies in the gallery.

Over the weekend Lee, Matt and I wandered down to Regents & Oxford streets for a bit of street photography.  The city was kind enough to close the roads to traffic on Saturday in order to encourage the Christmas shoppers to come out and play.

And come out they did!

It was essentially an orgy of advertising with loads of branded freebies being handed out and big screen televisions reminding us of what products we need to buy and which musicals we should see.  I know, musicals?  I was surprised too.  Those crafty thespians are getting wise.  There were some folks who were there just for the fun of it though.

Move over Santa, this year I’m sitting on Boba Fett’s knee and telling him what I want for Christmas.

From the throngs of shoppers on Oxford street, we decided to make our way to Hyde Park to experience the Winter Wonderland and the throngs of shoppers there.  The second group of shoppers were slightly more bearable, I think due to the close proximity to mulled wine, beer and Bavarian sausages.  We managed to find a bit of beer ourselves.

The Wonderland is infinitely better this year than it has been in the past.  Previous years had a sorry showing of maybe a dozen stalls and a few standard carnival rides that had been smothered in Christmas decorations to make them seem festive.  I’m sorry, but putting your 15 foot Grim Reaper in a red jumper doesn’t automatically mean your haunted house ride becomes full of yule tide joy.

This year they pulled out all the stops.  At a guess I’d estimate there were over a hundred shops and stalls and most were fairly unique and interesting.  There was no end to the sausage stands or mulled wine vendors, you almost had to feel sorry for the lonely Chinese food stall that was set up.  Nobody comes to a German Christmas market for sweet & sour chicken balls I’m afraid.

Saturday was actually my second visit to the Winter Wonderland, and I don’t imagine it will be my last either.  Definitely worth a visit or two, even if you’ve already finished up your Christmas shopping for the year.  Yea right!

There’s a few more photos in the gallery.

A quick afternoon along the south bank which ended at Doggett’s for our annual viewing of the Lord Mayor’s Show, and a few pints to celebrate Brian’s bday.  I had to forego the pints due to my voice-box crippling sore throat, but I did manage to get a few shots of the fireworks from Blackfriars Bridge.

I managed to get set up just as the fireworks started, so not much time to get the settings right but here are a few of the shots from the evening.

It was a short display, and not very colourful but any fireworks are better than no fireworks!

Going to a wedding as a guest who owns a fancy camera is always a bit of a dilemma.  They’re such great occasions and always hold some amazing photo opportunities, but there’s certainly something to be said for just relaxing, enjoying yourself and letting the hired pro’s do their thing while you enjoy yet another glass of champagne.

I’d spoken to my friend Robert about the whole thing and had firmly decided that since this was a wedding between two good friends of mine and that I was likely to know a lot of people there (and thus have less need to slink away from awkward conversations to take photos) that I would leave my camera behind and just have fun.

Then, on the eve of the wedding day at about 11:00pm I received a cute little text from the bride requesting that I “bring my fancy camera along tomorrow”.  I’ve never attempted it, but I suspect not giving a bride exactly what she wants on her wedding day would be bad for your health so I wasn’t about to start now.  The camera bag was packed and ready to go.

I’ll be honest when I say that wedding photographers scare me a little bit.  They have the ability to deal with large crowds of (often drunken) strangers without batting an eye.  They’ve also been known to be less than friendly to guests who turn up at the wedding with fancy SLR cameras and get in their way.

Fortunately, I was told by the bride that the hired photographers were only staying for the ceremonies and would be gone by the reception/dinner which made it easy to stay out of everyone’s way and to get some shots that wouldn’t overlap with what the pros were doing.

In the end I got some photos that I’m happy with, hopefully ones that Kate & Adam can enjoy, and I managed to drink more than my limit of delicious bubbly.  Wins all around I think!

Also, if I didn’t have my camera with me that night I never would have been able to take this couple’s photo.  He had a tonne of character, and quite possibly the greatest eyebrows ever.

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

I was out shooting with my good friend Rob and a few others this past weekend in Grays.  Ordinarily our shoots involve buildings, scenery or light painting but today was a bit different.  One of our fellow POTN members had set up a day of shooting with a few lovely models (are there any other kind?) for a Trash the Dress practice shoot.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept and don’t like following links in blogs, it generally involves a wedding dress or equally elegant gown and a setting you wouldn’t normally wear such an outfit in.  In today’s case, we had the sunny Amy and Natasha modeling a couple of eBay wedding dresses out on some estates and a beach in Essex.

The day started off slow as we (the photographers) were all more or less new to this type of shoot and we were tripping ourselves up trying to get different light synching methods to all work together.  In the end, we stuck to my trusty pocket wizard Plus II’s and just shot everything in manual.  After that, it was just a question of trying to figure out where and how to pose the models, which for me is the trickiest part of a shoot like this.  Fortunately, both of the girls had done this before and didn’t need a whole lot of direction.

Setup shot by Rob Bridgens

The main event of the day was to end up down at the beach to shoot a bit of a paint fight in front of the wreck of an old lightship called The Gull.  Rob and I snuck in a few more final shots in the dwindling light while everyone else waited patiently.

The paint fight itself was a bit chaotic; 6 photographers and a videographer all vying for a better vantage point while simultaneously avoiding paint splatter is not conducive to an organized shoot.  It was fun (for the girls especially), but there were lessons to be learned for the next attempt.

In the end, I think everyone walked away with some decent shots and picked up a few new skills or ideas which was what the entire process was about.

Thanks again to Steve for organizing it all.  Also thanks to Razvan for taking the videos of us shooting all day (and for holding light stands as well!).  The first video of our daytime shooting is available here and the second video which covers the paint fight is here.

There are a few more photos in the gallery.  It was hard to pick my favourites to post in the blog this time, so check out the rest!