And an “interesting” time was had by all

Well, finally back home after my sojourn in the big city. Actually, I arrived back late last Thursday evening (2nd April) but I’ve been up to my ears in it until now, sorting out loads of pics, getting them uploaded, and in between trying to re-establish some sort of normal routine (some hope!).

Um… think I overlooked mentioning I was at the G20 protests in London, with particular interest in the previously announced intentions of the Climate Campers to set up a 24-hour “flash camp” right in the heart of the city. A totally bizarre and truly delightful notion and one that, right up until it actually happened, I had difficulty believing could possibly succeed.
No doubt I’ll be writing more of that elsewhere, soon as I get my thoughts assembled into some sort of order.

But for the time being, given that this is ostensibly a photo-related blog, I’m gonna focus exclusively on that side of things.

So, for some time now I’ve been hooked into this little “photographers’ collective“, consisting principally of a select few (heh heh) photojourno types. Its all been pretty informal until fairly recently, but a few weeks ago we started to organise ourselves in earnest, and the G20 protests saw us turning out in force… a team of five of us in fact!

(Well, more like four-and-a-half really, but let’s not get too pedantic.) And “our glorious leader” even managed to get himself interviewed by some other media type… on video no less!

In fact, its been this “organising”, and preparing for the G20 protests, that’s been largely responsible for my sporadic and brief web appearances recently, as contrasted to my normal fairly prolific output.

The event was also the first opportunity to test out our new kit for real to see if its actually “fit for purpose”… that purpose being to enable us to get pics online “live” from events as they’re happening… well, virtually.
And I’m pleased to report the little notebooks performed flawlessly.

As anticipated power was a bit of an issue, meaning that periodically we left the “scene of the action” to get ourselves plugged into a power supply somewhere.
That said, it was more of a voluntary choice than dictated by necessity… in fact I didn’t get to use the battery at all though theoretically I could have done (for a short time anyway) if circumstances had required it.

We also discovered that for an event of this nature, which spans more than a day or so and with “stuff” happening practically all the time, a preferable way of working would be to have someone lurking in the background, away from the action, not actually taking photos themself but acting as a sort of “picture editor”, to whom we could offload filled memory cards and let them attend to the editing/uploading tasks whilst we get on with the actual business of getting the pics.
That’s what we’d have in an ideal world… whether it’ll actually happen or not is another matter entirely. And the reality is, probably not.

Can’t say I’m terribly enamored with the idea of lugging a computer around all over the place though. I always knew it was going to be an issue… weight was one of the main reasons I invested in the notebook in the first place. But, along with all the other kit I was carrying, after about twelve hours or so the old leg muscles really began to feel it! A full-size laptop would definitely have been a non-starter.
Another good argument then in favour of having a picture editor lurking about.

So, that’s about it then. Though don’t anyone for one moment think that with this particular adventure behind me I’ll be back to my frequent appearances. Not for a while anyway. Still got loads of write-ups to do about the experience for various places.

Meanwhile, all the pics are now on Flickr, but here’s a taster…