Messing About On The River*

Taken in 2001, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

Except it wasn’t me messing about, and it wasn’t a river.. it was a lake but apart from that today’s blog title is wholly accurate. Under an unrelenting grey sky, I took my boy out to one of his friends birthday party; in my day (ee, when I were a lad, there were twelve of us living in cardboard box in middle of road… etc.), parties were always round at the house of the birthday boy (or girl…) – these days there are a myriad of different activities where the party can be held, todays event was a new one on me, one I would have loved to have a go on myself. The town close to where I live has a number of reclaimed gravel pits bordering its outskirts, all have now formed large lakes with the surrounding land returning to nature. A number of these lakes have been adopted by various boating clubs, and on one of the lake banks a hotel has been built, this is where we headed. The ten boys, instead of a leisurely day messing about in boat, took it in turns to be pulled behind a fast moving speed boat five at a time, sitting astride a large inflatable “banana”. If there’s one thing, ten ten year old boys like – it’s speed and all of them were grinning like a cheshire cat (as was I) as they zoomed past where I was standing.

Now you’re probably wondering why on earth I’m telling you such things (don’t worry there won’t be a blog about the 2 hour grocery shopping trip from the previous day) and how that relates to either nature, tech or photography, the three subjects that grace the pages of this blog. Well, you’ve probably guessed already, I went fully prepared with a car boot (trunk) full of camera gear to photograph the event and I’m glad I did, I had a blast snapping away. In the hour that the boys were out on the water I took 834 photos, it could have been more as I stopped ten minutes before the end; the parents of the birthday boy had forgotten their camera, and as soon as the boys were all ready for more celebrating back home, I hot footed it back to base where I uploaded all the photos to my computer, sifted through the images and then selected the best (and removing lots of relatively similar images – having used the high speed capture mode ie 10 frames per second) which were transferred to DVD. When we went to collect our boy, I handed the disk over to the parents who were certainly impressed at how quick I’d been. The good thing of course, is that I ensured I had the settings on the camera right so I didn’t need to post-process any of the images, only sort the wheat from the chaff… and in this case the wheat made up over 50% of the initial number. Not a bad harvest indeed.

*And not this river either (actually it’s a lake, and it still wasn’t this one!)

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