Wednesday morning, 16 July. Up with the lark (well, before the lark actually… even before the sunrise in fact), having had about four hours’ sleep.
Why?
Cos I needed to jump on a train to get me down to London real early, almost before the metropolis begins to wake up.
Why?
Cos a bunch of folk calling themselves the Greenwash Guerillas (don’t you just love that name) are staging a demonstration outside the Business Design Centre at the ridiculously early hour of 0815. And of course, me being me, I need to get down there much earlier to a) find the damned place (allowing for my well-earned reputation of being able to get lost even on a one-way street!), and then b) having found the place do a recce with the principal intention of sussing out where both the coffeeshops and toilets are.
Why (the demo, that is)?
Well, this Business Design Centre place is apparently hosting a so-called “Climate Change Summit”, and the delegates thereto really do need to be informed that the “Summit” is being sponsored by e.on, a company entrenched in the power industry. Tha same company in fact that has plans to build the first new coal-fired power station in the UK for thirty years at Kingsnorth, in Kent.
(You can read more about it all here!)
And of course photographs of the event are simply begging to be taken, even at that time of the morning.
And with the forecast being for rain!
I must be mad!
As it turned out, the rain held off. In fact, once the event got under way the sun started peeking through just as though Life, the Universe and Everything were giving its blessing to the Guerillas’ cause.
Didn’t take the new camera with me (the GX20) cos I haven’t quite sorted out the white balance issue (though current thinking is that its nothing to do with the camera per se but rather the way my existing apps are reading the RAW data). So the trusty GX10 came with me instead… along with the 400D of course.
Shot a couple of cards’ full of pics, then back home by just after midday to steam into the sorting/processing/uploading and get them online as quick as pos, plus letting relevant interested parties know of course.
But had to interrupt that to get to back into town during the evening (a spin-off from which was yet more urgent stuff to be done soon as I returned home!) then finally resume messing around with the day’s pics.
(You can see the full set here)
And after all that, turn my mind (and hands, and computer and stuff) to the thorny issue of the GX20′s white balance.
Which, between installing new progs (or rather, updated versions of existing progs), a load of testing, and exchanging a flurry of emails with a knowledgeable mate, now seems well on the way to getting sorted.
So, some 27 hours after I first surfaced I finally managed to get a top-up of that four hours’ sleep I’d had before the fun and games started.
I definitely must be mad!
Well I certainly appreciated all your hard work for the demo gig. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and commented upon same (as you already know).
What I didn’t know was what a long days work it was for you.
Cheers mate.
Thanks forkboy. Alas, if you do the thing properly a lot of these events tend to turn out that way (a long day’s work!), especially if there’s a need to get the photos out quickly.
Still, its all good fun… afterwards, much afterwards!
I visited your photostream and I must say I really enjoyed all the photos! I would have loved to have been there. It looked like it was lots of fun.
Thanks Tam. Yeah, it was quite fun… everyone seemed to be in a fairly good humour and, to a large extent, even the cops just stood around not doing very much.