Carling Weekend Festival

The opposite of serendipity!

Two hours I spent on the phone, trying to get tickets for the Brazil v Argentina game at Arsenal's shiny new stadium. Two hours!
Then 30 minutes after I've parted with my money, a client rang up and asked "Can you come down to Arsenal tomorrow for a photocall to promote the Brazil v Argentina game? I can get you some tickets...."

Serendipity

V Festival 2006. Not the most exciting line-up of bands, torrential rain at times, and I didn't feel that I was getting great photos.
Yet, I managed to get 8 pictures in the papers over the weekend.
- Funny how that can happen sometimes.

Not a bad life

It's a sunny weekend and I'm at the Ben & Jerry's Sundae on Clapham Common.
It's a chilled atmosphere, some good bands, and as much free ice cream as you can make yourself sick on.
I rode the helterskelter, tried all the flavours, met Mystic Moo the mind-reading cow...
Oh, and I took 3,562 pics in two days.
Not a bad life really...

Summer's here

It's Summer Ball Season.
This was from the Conde Nast summer party.

So here's the brief:

Publicity shots for a Chinese Opera that's coming to London. It's about a woman from rural China, who finds herself lost and disorientated in modern day Shanghai. The pictures need to show a traditional Yue-Ju opera singer in an urban setting, BUT it mustn't look like London.
At first I thought this would be simple, and had vague ideas of concrete walls with graffiti, but that was no good because it wouldn't be Chinese graffiti.
So we went to Chinatown to find a busy backdrop - but Chinatown is more evocative of traditional China, not modern Shanghai.
Finally we tried using modern glass and steel buildings as a backdrop - only to see classical European architecture, red buses and London street signs in the reflections! Dagnabbit!
Here's what we ended up with.

Agony

Watching England take penalties is agonising enough, but having to watch OTHER people watching the penalties....

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Halle Berry & Borat (aka Sasha Baron Cohen) at Cannes.

Travelling Light

I can't do it. I can't just pack my gear and go to bed.
I have to potter around all night checking I've got everything, then I realise I've only got an hour or so until the taxi arrives, and it's not worth going to bed. So when I arrive at the Cannes Film festival I'm knackered before I've taken a frame!
Here's all the equipment I took. Cameras, lenses, laptop, video, tripod, chargers, step, tuxedo...
I was expecting an excess baggage charge at the Airport, but when they weighed my bag they told me it over the Health and Safety limit of what the baggage handlers could lift. - And that was WITHOUT all the heavy cameras, lenses and laptop, which went on as hand luggage!

The Big Cheese

To celebrate National Cheese on Toast Day (no, I didn't know there was one either!), Macmillan Cancer Support made an attempt at creating the world's largest cheese on toast.
Problem: if it's so big, how are you going to grill it?
Solution: get a fire eater to blow flames across. Duh, obviously.

And here's me with a Mouse's head on. I'm starting to think there's a theme here.

CL24

Last weekend I covered Carling Live 24. I had to snap 19 bands, at 8 venues, in 24 hours! This years CL24 ran from 7pm-7pm, which meant that I'd been up all day before I started (I had marked in my diary 'afternoon nap' - but it never happened). By the end of the gigs I'd been up for 39 hours straight. I had 2 beers to celebrate, which went straight to my head, then promptly fell asleep on the tube and woke up at the end of the line. Amazingly I still had all my equipment with me.
Oh, and someone poured a pint of beer over my 70-200 lens to boot.
My highlights from the gigs were Dirty Pretty Things (singer Carl Barat above), and the Cuban Brothers, who are heroes for putting a smile on my face at 3 o'clock in the morning!

Hooray hoorah!

Just a wee experiment. Not sure if this is a diary, mouthpiece, personal gallery or what. Let's see what happens.
This is me at the Wild Weekend festival in Benidorm, on Tiki night. I thought I'd wear the head for an hour or so then get bored, but I ended up with it on for 7 hours solid. I even won a Stretch Armstong for my trouble.