Shooting inside a Church, Painting with Light, and the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla

It's been a busy time since the last blog entry!  Several shoots, one of which I can't divulge any shots from just yet (oh the intrigue) but three main ones that I can, so here goes!

A couple of weeks back, Yol and I went to visit Saint Giles Church in Cheadle with the Willfield Camera Club to try our hand at shooting at night inside a church.  We'd generously been given access to the church for our shooting for an hour and a half, and so with a little coordination to make sure that we didn't venture into each other's shots, a hearty band of around twelve photographers set up tripods and cranked up the ISO settings!

The inside of the church is beautiful, and very calming even though there were so many of us in a relatively small space.  It also made for a nice setting for an interesting portrait of Yol!:

The full set of photos from the church can be seen on Flickr here: Saint Giles Church photo set.


Experimentation in photography is always a fun and educational experience, and with that in mind, Yol and I teamed up with Glyn, Claire and Yvonne and headed up Sneyd Hill one evening to experiment with light painting.  Armed with a head torch, a pack of sparklers, some lighting wire, a can of deodorant and Yvonne's not-so-trusty ciggie lighter, we tried out several different long exposure ideas with the backdrop of Stoke at night behind us.

The most successful shots came from the ingenuity of Yvonne to house some wire wool inside an egg whisk on the end of a dog chain; once the wire wool was ignited and spun around it created some stunning images!

The set of shots can be seen here: Painting With Light.


Today was a rather special day at work! This evening I had the pleasure of handing out the awards at the Level 4 screening of the Keswick documentaries, which was a very enjoyable experience.  But in terms of photography, the highlight today came this morning when I had the opportunity to shoot some behind-the-scenes stills on the Media Centre News Set.  Student journalist Will Piper was recording an interview segment for Staffs Live, and the interviewee was none other than Chris Jericho, the frontman of the band Fozzy and former WWE wrestler!

Chris was an excellent interviewee, giving a very entertaining and insightful interview to Will, and I had the opportunity to shoot before and during the recording:

After the interview, we had the chance to get some photos with Chris, so we took it in turns to get our photos taken!  This one of me was taken by Rich Mortimer, and I'm pretty chuffed with it!

The set can be seen on Flickr here: Chris Jericho at Staffs Live.

Thanks for reading!