UKC Student Activity Awards Night
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Each year those students and societies that put special effort into making student life at the University of Kent worthwhile or/and contributed to the newspaper and radio station are honoured at the UKC Student Activity Awards Night. This year it was on March 28th and apart from covering the night for inQuire, I received one of those shiny glass awards myself. Bragging is healthy once in a while: I am now officially Best inQuire Photographer 2007/8. Yay!
For the pictures of myself on stage I passed the camera on to fellow photographer Dave Cater. All pictures were taken with the Canon EOS 40D and EF 70-200 2.8L IS lens, mostly at F/2.8, ISO 1250 and 1/100.
Rutherford Raiders win Cup Final
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Congratulations to the Rutherford Raiders who won this year’s University of Kent College Cup 3:2 against Parkwood United. All pictures taken with the Canon EOS 40D, EF 70-200 2.8L IS and Kenko 1.5x Teleconverter.
Update: Thanks to Simon for informing me about the final score.
Kent Union Election Results
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Sometimes, I have to work with the pressure of a wedding photographer and the salary of a bartender. Such an occasion was the results night in the Venue last Thursday, when the winners of the Kent Union elections were announced. In spite of tricky conditions for shooting I managed to be in the right place at the right moment for most of the night.
Congratulations to the winners:
Union President – Tom Christian
NUS Delegate – Faith Victoria
VP Welfare – Tom Page
VP Education – Helen Palmer
VP Sports – Cai Robbins
VP Activities – Caz Brooker
Men’s Officer – Liam Carmichael
Women’s Officer – Nicola Barker
Ethics and Environmental Officer – Peter Gray
LGBT Officer – Jack Bowman
Students with disabilities Officer – Marsha Todd
Postgraduate Officer – Jason Simpkins
RAG President – Ian Simons
International Officer – Charlotte Brower
Student Trustee – Taiwo Otaiku, James Howard
Keynes JCC President – Lauren Granville
Darwin JCC President – Iain Kiy
Eliot JCC President – Helen Wood
Rutherford JCC President – Alice Maskell
Parkwood Committee President – Sven Stear
Kent Union Election Campaigning
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During election week the University of Kent Campus is usually crowded with candidates for the different positions available within Kent Union for the next academic year, and their eager campaigning assistants. This year the dismal weather significantly reduced the number of students strolling over campus, and, consequently, the campaigners clustered in front of Eliot college to brave the rain-promising skies together.
CSR Elections
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Canterbury Student Radio elected a new executive team in the Orange Street Music Club. Congratulations to the people elected to the positions for next year.
Kent Law Temple Society Annual Dinner
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Every year the Temple society invites its members to meet established prominent legal professionals (mostly senior barristers and judges) and academics. If I took your photo at this event, you can get a copy of the photos from the Temple Society.
Jean Carlos
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Singer, actor and musical director Jean Carlos Lopez met me in town for a shooting on an overcast afternoon. Locations in Canterbury included Westgate, the Westgate gardens, Greyfriars, High Street, and the Cathedral.
National University Kickboxing Championships
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I covered this annual free event for the Student Newspaper. For most shots I used some fill light from an on-camera 580EX flash in ETTL mode. For additional setting information mouse-over the pictures.
UKC Fashion Show
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Today the University of Kent’s Annual Fashion Show promotional poster has officially been released and posted all over campus. The Fashion Show is hosted by the UKC Photography and Modeling society and more information can be found here.
Click on the first picture to see a larger version of the poster. For the photographers among you, I’ve included some behind the scenes information. The second photo should give you an idea of the setup. Shooting tethered to a laptop gave me the possibility to get instead feedback on a large screen and accurately solve potential issues. It was also practical as the camera on the tripod was raised a good deal above eye level.
The 580EX Speedlite was aimed at the ceiling just above, which is angled and bounced the light softly onto the models. It also acted as a master to trigger a 430EX (thanks Sebastian) in manual slave mode to the camera right. Its light was bounced into a reflector to allow for softer light. The camera settings were 1/200th second at F/8.0 with an ISO setting of 800 and 28mm focal length.
Post processing started with crating a composite of the best expressions of the different models. Next the background had to be cleaned up and some colour changes applied to clothes. Then a gradient glow was added to the two main models and the light burst created. After feedback from photogen.lu some further changes were made. Together with David Cater the logo and text layout were finalized.
The Fashion Show promotion has seen some other creative minds at work as well, below is the trailer filmed by Lee Francis:
The eagle-eyed may spot me among the extras.
Thank you for smoking
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I’ve spent the entire weekend listening to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. After 20+ hours of non-stop audio book listening to finish in time for the next seminar you too will begin to see strange things in abstract shapes. Take a look at the pictures, guess what they could represent and then mouse-over to see my interpretation.
Caution: After 100 shots on full power, the batteries coming out of a 580EX Speedlite flash will burn your fingers.
Goodfellas Poker Night
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Since our hosts decided we’d need to wear appropriate clothing for the Goodfellas Poker Night I thought I might as well take the camera along and take some shots before we get started. I still had a friend’s Canon Speedlite 480EX from a poster shooting the day before (which will be posted soon) so I went for off-camera lighting. The basic setup is the 480 in slave mode triggered wirelessly by the 580EX as master.
Uhm yeah I lost the last game against Juan. Tonight’s James Bond Poker night, so watch out Juan, you won’t get away with it that easily this time.
Update: I beat Juan but lost against Goose this time…
Kent Union Annual Report
Last autumn Kent Union contacted me and asked if they could use some of my photographs for their Annual Report which is sent to their stakeholders. I think the layouter did a pretty good job in using the photos to accompany the information-heavy text in the booklet. But see for yourself:
I should note that, contrary to the statement on the back, not all photographs are by me. I did not take the pictures on pages 4/5 (overexposed and white balance issues, ouch), nor the ones on pages 12/13. [And in hindsight I should have cloned out that can on page 8…]
Australia Day
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Last Saturday was Australia Day in the Venue. I had a good time and didn’t have to dodge too many drinks with the camera. Above are some of the pictures I took that evening, for the other 300 or so visit live2flirt.
Varsity January 2008
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Every year, Canterbury’s two universities, the University of Kent and Christ Church University compete against each other in a series of sportive events. In terms of photography, the event is challenging in a number of ways. First of all, it’s impossible to cover all of Varsity alone, as almost all of the over 30 games happen during a single afternoon at different venues. I decided to stick to the events happening in the University of Kent’s sports halls: Dodgeball, Netball, Basketball, Badminton, and Trampolining. Fencing, which I was looking forward to, was cancelled. The next problem is linked to the venue: the main hall is terribly lit, much darker than most sport halls. Which means that I had to push my new Canon EOS 40D all the way up to ISO 3200 at an aperture of 2.8 to get a decent exposure at around 1/400th of a second. I think the new sensor did a pretty good job handling the noise. And then there is the daunting task of covering sport events for seven successive hours. Again, the 40D surprised me, it seemed the battery could have provided power for the camera and the lens’s autofocus all day long. I did charge it once in between though to avoid unpleasant surprises.
CSR FM Birthday Celebration
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One year ago, Canterbury saw the birth of CSR FM, ‘the first ever community FM radio station in the UK run exclusively by students’. I had then covered the launch party for inQuire. This time CSR asked me directly to cover their celebration party in Kent Union’s night club, the Venue. The line-up included DJs from the station itself, the upcoming band Touriste, and a group of breakdancers that performed on the dancefloor – or tried to do so: it seemed to me that they were not too happy with the DJ’s choice of music. I’ve seen their amazing moves last year and was rather disappointed that the act was let down by a DJ who at that point didn’t seem to notice what happened around him.
With this post I’ve also updated the appearance of the blog galleries in which the pictures are displayed. I think it integrates more smoothly into the rest of the site now.
2007 Favourites
I’ve put together my favourite pictures from this year and arranged them in a short slideshow. I’m having a bit of trouble finding the right settings to make the whole thing web-friendly, so for now all I can offer is a 10MB video with dimensions that really don’t do the photographs any justice, but hey.
I wish everyone a happy new year; I’m off to Méribel.
Sports: November and December
I’ve finally more or less finished my last essay for this term. Which means I now have time to go through the pile of recent photographs on my hard disc and bring the blog up to date. This is a quick video with photos from sport events here in the UK, mostly at the University of Kent, and most of them published in our student newspaper.
Halloween at the Venue
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What a fabulous night at the UKC’s Venue. People do tend to show up there in all kinds of fashion, but Halloween allows everyone to look as unique and ridiculous as they want without being turned away by the bouncers. A costume was quickly found, I put on my camouflage poncho I bought for shooting sports when it’s raining, the camo trousers, got some brown and green face paint and I was ready to go. Well, not quite yet, I made the camera fit my outfit.
I started the night with the Photographers and Models Society and a Halloween themed shooting around Eliot college (photographs coming soon), then queued a whopping 25 minutes to get a drink in the Lighthouse and spent the rest of the night in the Venue partying and shooting. Well, the shooting bit ended at around eleven when the place was so packed I couldn’t even hold the camera in front of my face anymore!
Kent FC vs. Royal Holloway
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Goose’s Birthday
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Another night out with my £20 digicam. Happy Birthday Goose!
Photographers and Models @ UKC
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Yesterday the Photographers and Models @ UKC society, of which I am now vice-president, had its introductory meeting. Rather than just talking about what the society’s plans for the year are we jumped right into the action with a spontaneous session of what we call Speed Photography. Every photographer worked with a number of models and vice-versa to capture a set of given emotions. I’ve uploaded the pictures from the models I’ve worked with. After that we initiated models and photogs to the versatile Painting with Light technique. By accident Dave and I bumped into a few fire artists next to Rutherford college, so we put the technique we taught earlier into practice right away.
I’m looking forward to the next sessions with the society.
UKC Freshers’ Ball
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There’s no freshers’ week without the traditional Freshers’ Ball. For this year’s line-up, Kent Union managed to get hold of BootyLuv, Scouting for Girls, xFM and the Venue’s resident DJs.
The Union decided to make some changes to the Venue over summer and I have to say that I love their new light equipment. Makes for some nice photographs :) Now I can’t wait to see their interactive dancefloor in action.
If you want to see the photographs in print, be sure to grab a copy of the next edition of inQuire, out across campus on October 23rd.
Fresher’s Week Sports Day
A few days ago the Park Wood pitches at the
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Dance robot, dance!
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Yesterday, Keynes College at the UKC organized the world’s largest robot dance. 276 people dressed up as robots performed a choreographed dance and broke the world record. The event was witnessed by representatives of the Guinness Book of Records and covered by local media.