At the end of October we had our second photographers get together, this time in sunny Blackpool. This was a combination of the [b] school members (most of the great folks who met last time) and the photographers’ network set up by Stewart Randall. It was a brilliant couple of days; the first day involved hours of great chat about photography and business in the pub, a shoot down the beach, Chinese and dodgy bars in the evening. The next morning we had lots more chat over coffee and compared our sample albums.

Skip this paragraph if you’re not interested in photography techy stuff! I decided to process the images in the Lightroom 3 Beta to give it a try. I’m currently using Lightroom 1.4 and doing most of the processing in Photoshop. Lightroom 3 is brilliant, I can do pretty much all of the processing I need in there, which is much quicker than going into Photoshop. The new film grain feature is absolutely wonderful and it really enhances the noise from the ISO 6400+ images that were taken at the night shoot. The colour noise reduction is amazing too and makes ISO 12800 and ISO 25600 really, really useable and that’s without any luminance noise reduction (which is currently disabled in the Beta version). Adding film grain to an image with heavy digital noise absolutely transforms it into a lovely image. Who needs noise reduction!?

Here we are congregating outside the hotel ready for the evening shooting in the dark:

Stewart Randall brought a very cool box of lighting to try some off-camera flash:

We head down to the beach, Olivia volunteered to be our model since the one we organised had to cancel. In the photo; Laura Lawson, Susie Lawrence, Hayley Ruth, Rebecca Honeywell, Olivia Brabbs and Pete Lawson

A typical retaliation from a photographer about to have his photo taken is to return fire, here’s Pete Lawson:

Heading towards the beach; Stewart, Barnaby Aldrick, Mark Lenik, Neil Matthews, Chris MacKenzie, Phil Barber and Rob Booker

The 3B Media guys did their off camera flash thing down on the beach:

As well as being excellent photographers, Rebecca and Hayley make very good light stands!

Mark Lenik, an amazing film maker (the only videographer in the group of photographers) put together a superb video from the two days.

Olivia Brabbs volunteered to be on the other side of the camera and model for us and did a fantastic job:

Susie Lawrence decided to have a go and was an excellent model too:

Pete likes what he sees:

It was getting really dark at this point, but the 5D MKII low light capabilities are AMAZING. This shot of Laura Lawson standing in the dark was taken at ISO 25600, 1/25s, f/2.8 – I think the colour rendition is amazing considering the high ISO (and the mixture of light sources – it was Blackpool after all!)

Here’s Susie Lawrence and Mark Byrne practicing a bit of POINT and SHOOT:

Here’s Mark again creating his video masterpiece with two of the stars: Laura and Pete

Phil Barber and a bit of chimping:

A dodgy pair in the back streets of Blackpool

The next morning, I tried out Laura and Pete’s 50mm 1.2 lens, Chris MacKenzie was one of my victims.

I think Rebecca spotted me…

Hayley tried out Laura’s Lens Baby:

Then I gave Laura’s 85mm 1.8 a go, this time Susie Lawrence was the test subject:

Here are a few of us in a deep discussion about the photography business and album manufacturers… or maybe we were just trying to decide whether to stay for another coffee

It was brilliant to see everyone again and meet a whole bunch of new people too. Can’t wait for the next one!

Here are a few more excellent posts from the trip:

The Lawson’s Blackpool Write-up

Barnaby Aldrick

Phil Barber (you need to scroll down a bit)

Rebecca Honeywell

Mark Byrne