I recently rediscovered Big Train on YouTube. I remember it being an excellent and very silly series but didn’t remember that it contained many of the folk involved in more recent comedy. Simon Pegg (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), Mark Heap (who plays Brian the tortured artist in Spaced as well as Tertius in Stardust), Kevin Eldon (whose name I have only just learnt) and others.

If you’re not aware of it, it’s well worth a look…

Yesterday, the dining room became a makeshift studio to shoot some engagement photos for the most lovely SimonG and Jess. I ran through ‘the usual’ shots with Jess showing off her ring, but wanted to try something a little different too. The result came out quite well, I think…

There’s no reason, as Jonathan recently showed why a limited space should limit your results too greatly.

Hot on the heels of How To Speak Fluent Japanese Without Saying a Word and How To Speak Fluent Japanese Without Hardly Saying a Word comes Ken Tanaka and Remi February’s latest lesson: How To Speak Fluent Japanese By Speaking English.

I have a personal experience of this when I was on Kyoto railway station in need of sustenance, and found a Tuna Sandwich, labelled as it would be “ツナサンドイチ”, or Tsuna Sandoichi. I asked (in fluent English-with-a-Japanese-accent) “Tsuna Sandoichi onegai shimasu” to which the lady behind the counter began praising my wonderful Japanese to my culturally required self-deprecating denial.

Anyway… on to Ken and Remi’s lesson… note that you may need some of the information from the earlier lessons to completely understand the example dialogues.

Part of the reason I had no time to run the Tuesday Challenge is due to the pending launch of Camera Tutor, a blog-style hints and tips site containing weekly tutorials for all levels of photographers.

It will launch on Friday 1st January, 2010 and have new content each Friday morning.

Just saw an advert for Quick Quid, the short-term loan company. The small print stated: Typical 2356% APR

I though there must have been a typo, but no.

2356% APR.

Nothing like exploiting the vulnerable.

Example – if you’re in their high-risk group, you could borrow £1500, and by next payday you’ll have to give them back £1942.50. Is that not criminal?

The site is redone. There may be the odd bit of teething trouble, but I reckon it’s fit for public consumption.

Here it is!

I’ve also moved the photography blogging (the professional stuff at any rate) onto the Latest News page of the site. I’ll continue to ramble inanely on this blog, don’t worry!

Incidentally, I have to say I’m very proud of those little buttons along the top that light up and stay lit and stuff. That took some real life programming like wot I used to do as a day job. I got a little nostalgic.

Time to re-read the excellent book that sweavo got me for Christmas last year. My photography site is ok. Every time I do a redesign it looks much better than it used to. But I feel it’s getting away from me again.

The challenge this time is to redesign without rebranding. My business cards and stationery are all good, I think – giving the view of quality and competence. The site needs a revisit and that revisit is about to start.

Incidentally, as loyal blog readers, have a sneak preview of my new slideshow Update: Deleted since I’ve redesigned the whole site. I haven’t finished adding photos to it yet (the repeat is too soon), but any comments would be welcome.

Today I was reminded of Pocketeers. Anyone else remember them fondly? The GameBoy of their day!

There’s a site about them here.

How many engineers does it take to change a lightbulb? And how many attempts does it take to photograph the activity?

Depends on the light bulb in question…

So… that’s it. Time up. The deadline has passed for Christmas portrait photographs, and what a lovely bunch of people I met at the weekend getting those last minute shots in. We used the usual studio space in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside – beautiful while it wasn’t raining, anyway, and had a ball!

I can’t decide if my favourites were the couple with the great little boy who wants to be a pop star (and threw all the best poses too, once he’d warmed up to the idea of being photographed). Or was it the lovely lady with the three teenage sons, all four of them great fun and most cool?

I think, due to the levels of pain I witnessed during their pile-up (their own idea) it has to be the latter! I did point out to them that putting mum on the bottom of the pile might not be such a diplomatic idea – the final shot was a pile of lad with mum sitting sedately on top. Great stuff!

One of my favourite photographs from the weekend was probably this one…

So, that wraps it up, and now it’s time for me to do the last of the printing and then I can start wrapping up my presents. Har har, see what I did there? No? Not very good? Oh, ok.

Well, I’m still enjoying my job as a Leicestershire Photographer, and I still think the redundancy last year was one of the best things to ever happen to me. It’s hard to believe I’ve been a pro photographer for less than twelve months, and only doing studio portraiture for maybe five or six of them.

photographer Leicestershire | wedding photographer Leicestershire