Linford Christie at Swindon Street Athletics Competition

What a nice guy Linford Christie is. Today he brought Street Athletics to Swindon and it was a big success. There were lots and lots of young runners who signed up for the chance to race with the possibility of running in the finals in Manchester later on in the year. It is all part of a nationwide search for new talent.

Linford was so good with everybody, spending so much time talking, laughing and joking with everybody and spent hours signing T-Shirts and anything else people could find to get his autograph on.

This is only a very small selection of the 400 images I took today. If you were there and taking part I probably have an image or images of you, if you are interested give me a shout.

Great fun, great weather and a great guy.

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Holmes Music Store Vinyl Record Weekend

Well, here I am back again. It has been a very busy few weeks and hence no posts for quite a while. Not the least I ran the London Marathon last Sunday. I wasnt happy with my time as I got tripped up at mile 5 and face planted the road. However I was very very proud of Kirsty Heber-Smith who ran it in a time of 3.44, exactly as we had planned it and also raised £2.5K for the charity Goldenhar which is one close to our hearts. If you dont know what Goldenhar is please chaeck it out, it’s worth it.

Anyhow back to photography. I spent several hours over two days at Alan Holmes Music shop where they were celebrating Vinyl Record weekend with lots of live music by local bands and artists. I wont list them all out as there were too many to mention, but I was impressed with all of them. Have to say the lighting was a nightmare as they had a back drop of the window and day 1 was bright sunshine, day 2 was dark clouds and rain!!! good old British Easter eh!!!! However the good thing about situations like that is firstly it is good to work in difficult situations that are out of your control and secondly you can get up close and personal and nobody minds.

It was a good weekend. I have also a very busy week coming up this week, lots of photographic jobs on so should be posting a lot in the next week and less rambling on 🙂

Sunday Project – No More

Well no photo of Sunday anymore. Why? I have been carrying out quite a bit of research and despite it being only the 4th Sunday of the year I have decided to bin it because it is not providing any benefit to me or anybody else. Stats are showing very few hits on those posts and to be honest I can understand why. There is no theme and is therefore completely random and unless I am on another assignment then I am just taking an image just for the sake of it with very little thought behind it. With very little information around the photo, why it was taken etc then why would anybody actually be interested in reading it.

What I should be doing more of is explaining things and why I do them, how I do them etc.

So as a start, I did a small photo shoot this morning. It was only mug shots for the person to send off as part of his profile as part of a competition. It was carried out in a gym, (in the squash court to be precise) where lighting is just awful. And short of getting the flash and umbrellas out it was a case of the ISO at 3200 and hope for the best. I just did not feel happy with the results which prob will suffice for what it was for but I just did not feel satisfied. Which at the end of the day is what it is all about for me. I have to feel emotionally involved in what I am doing and I didnt. Is that true of all professional photographers? I dont want to just earn money and not feel as though I have not done a good job.

So this blog is going to go back to the Swindon News/Photojournalism and I am not going to try to combine other things with it.

Likewise I am going to re-design my website to provide a better experience, better show case for my better images from both the UK and Spain and try to make it more interesting.

TotalSwindon Train in Spain Mainly on the Plain

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Well, I am back in Swindon now and back to covering Swindon issues but just wanted to put up a post of me on one of my training runs in the hills above the village of Freila in Spain where I have been staying for the last three weeks. I have to say the running around there is absolutely spectacular on some days.
On a few of the days I went out the door in thick mist (Freila is at 800 mts) only to run through the cloud base out into the sunshine and views that I have to say were just stunning, where the hill tops and mountains were poking out above the clouds. Just absolutely stunning.
I will put some photos up in another post of the views, I never carried a camera whilst running but did walk up there and take shots.
Many thanks to my girlfriend Jacquie (who lives in Freila) for taking these shots.

Swindon a lovely day for a run

No photos today but I just wanted to make a comment on how friendly everybody was on my run yesterday.

It was sat morning and the weather was just perfect for a run or a bike ride. As I am competing in the Swindon Half Marathon in two weeks time I thought I would go out and run the course again. Firstly the weather was bright and sunny and clear which made the views up on the downs absolutely stunning. It was an absolute joy to be up there. Secondly and I dont know if it was because of the weather, fall out from the Olympics or what but everybody smiled or said hello or at least acknowledged me as I was running. Cyclists and runners all saying hello. Now I have been a runner, cyclist, triathlete on and off for 40 years and I have to say it hasnt always been like that. I have lived and worked in many places around the world and ran in most of them. Not everybody is that friendly, in fact in Saudi I have had rocks thrown at me, cars swerve to run me over and in one case one of the other runners got shot at and took a round in his leg!!!! So, it was an absolute pleasure to run around Swindon with happy people on such a lovely sunny day.