Bardcamp photos
My photos from Bardcamp are up on my web site.
There are really quite a lot of photos this year! I was ably assisted by my wonderful photographic assistants mirabehn and vectorious in taking about 1500 photos over the course of the weekend of which I kept 1200 (which filled up the 4Gb memory card - I thought that would be way big enough). I have trimmed this down to a mere 1000ish for the web. You'll have to take your time when browsing through them, but you have until next year. :-)
I would recommend the full screen slide show feature on the web site. Also, you will need an account on my site to be able to see some of the images, including photos of Rebecca and Daniel. Note that some of the folders have two pages of photos in them - it's easy to miss this. Macbeth has the most images (199!), followed by Edward III and King Lear. If you would like the huge original copy of any of the photos please let me know. If lots of people would like huge photos then I could work something out.
Can I say a big thank you to everyone for allowing me to take photos of them! I really like taking photos of you guys. You seem to have grown accustomed to me merrily hopping around the action taking photos from different angles.
Although I say so myself, the photos are significantly better than my shots from previous years, thanks largely to my shiny new camera (Canon 400D DSLR). You may not have realised this, but there is very little light at Bardcamp which makes cameras struggle a lot. Previously there was either the choice of using flash which made everyone look ill and flat and took several seconds to charge up, or no flash which was then blurry and grainy. Focusing used to be very slow and there was always a long delay between pressing the shutter button and the camera actually firing which was very frustrating.
Now low light performance is good and focusing is super fast. I set up the camera to focus continuously while I held the shutter button half way, so I could just wait for the right moment and fire. Usually this meant waiting for people to look up - we already have hundreds of photos of people looking down reading from scripts from previous years.
Quasi-techie bit:
For most of the weekend I used my fastest lens because of the low light conditions - 50mm f/1.8. I was using this on maximum aperture to get light in which of course has the effect of giving a very narrow depth of field. This is great for portrait shots of people because the background blurs away nicely, but it's quite difficult to keep things in focus and shots of two or more people can be tricky to get right. I can probably do things better next time using some different settings for a number of shots. The lens is fixed focal length and it's quite long (50mm x 1.6 because of cropped sensor) so it's quite in-your-face and gets close to the action but to get group shots I was backing away right up to the walls. My other lenses are better for wide angle, but they're slower - the next fastest is f/3.5.
Perhaps next year we can install some better lighting in the Ebenezer chapel. Mind you, the electricity meter would go mad and eat even more coins. Next year I'll bring a spare battery and even more memory.
I hope you like the photos.