Every Lisper's Nightmare

Woo hoo! Last night we got permission from the band's management to use a favourite track by The 6ths on our main site, so it's now there as the soundtrack to the Gallery 2 slideshow on the pictures page. It's off a Stephin Merritt CD called "Pieces of April" on Nonesuch Records, and yes that is Stephin with an "i". His website is here

We're still working on replacing the elevator music on the Gallery 3 show. It was going to be an obscure track off a Buddha Bar CD that we really like which has lyrics in Tibetan, but the best offer from the label in Paris was that we could use it for one year for 2000 Euros instead of the 6000 they'd normally want for the privilege ...

The Bit You Don't See #5

Just found this picture of two-thirds of a jazz trio, a photographer and a bloke in a bridal gown taking five during the meal at a wedding last year ...

The Land Of Big Tractors

We went up to Norfolk on Monday and gosh do they have big tractors up there nowadays! Presenting a seminar for 40 or so wedding photographers who had nothing better to do that evening was fun, but the best was yet to come ...

It's comforting to know that some things never change, and that the classic 1970's English Hotel Experience can still be had. We'd asked for a quiet room, and were relieved to find that the bar underneath it wasn't actually as noisy as it could have been. Our room boasted two radiators powered by the noisiest central heating system imaginable, which ran flat out all night. We couldn't turn them off because the valves were corroded, but luckily the windows opened so we didn't overheat.

By about 3am we'd got used to the noise and had mananged to get to sleep - until at 5.25am the road sweeper lorry went very slowly past right underneath our open windows. Road sweeping lorries are very noisy in Norfolk and the drivers of them are very thorough, this one making no less than three passes up and down the same bit of road outside our room to make sure that it was left pristine. At least that made sure that we were still awake to hear the bin men turn up 20 minutes later, and to marvel at how loud the reversing bleepers are on bin lorries in Norfolk.

We were just so glad that we'd asked for a quiet room, and felt that it would have been churlish to complain about having to fill a waste bin with water to flush the loo. We're still not sure what the evil slimy fungus was that was climbing up the wall behind it, but it was really interesting.

Breakfast was OK though, in a very 1970's English hotel way ...

Venues and the checking out of

That's a picture of a venue, in this case Buxted Park in East Sussex which is just down the road from us. But for the purposes of what follows, it could be pretty much any venue anywhere.

When we first started shooting weddings, one of the first things we did after getting the booking was check out the venue. We did this for three reasons: it was apparently expected of us, other photographers seemed to make a big deal of doing it, and frankly we didn't know any better.

After a while, three things became apparent. One was that because we rarely work at local venues, checking one out could easily wipe out half or more of a working day. Another was that as we got more experience, we found that from an operational and logistics point of view, a lot of places are actually pretty similar. And the third was that we'd often find that having checked the place out, things were very different indeed on the day!

So for the last few years we've worked on the principle that if we don't know a venue, we'll check it out if we're in the area on other business and we can make the time to do so. Otherwise, we won't unless it's obvious to us that we need to.

One final thought on this is that at some venues, the people you're dealing with will assure you that it's absolutely vital that your photographer checks it out because otherwise they won't have a clue where to go or what to do and your pictures will be a disaster.

No they won't.

Data Security And The Compost Heap

I've just been asked if the bit about the compost heap in the "Privacy Policy" at the bottom of the contact page of our site is true.

Yes it is :)