This is a set of photos I took on the campsite at Bideford Folk Festival, in a large old army tent. Musicians would come in and sing or play (or both) and for me it was the highlight of the week.

Light was provided by 3 lightbulbs in the centre of the tent, but mostly nobody sat under these. Generally the shots are at least 2 stops underexposed from ISO 3200, 1/60th @ F2.8. So expect them to be noisy. The autofocus didn’t work superbly under these conditions either, spoiling a few otherwise superb shots.

I’m writing this on the Sunday night after a week in Bideford, a pretty little town in Devon. Overall it has been good fun. The campsite is lovely, being sited on the side of a hill overlooking the river at the Hallsannery Field Centre. The site was well appointed, having great features like a separate tap with a hosepipe on it to fill a motorhome’s tanks and another tap for flushing out cassette toilets. There was a tent on the site where late night sessions could be had, with lots of people joining in.
(more…)

Click this piccy to go to the photos page.

So I did the Dartmoor Folk Festival next, and what a pleasant change. Nice and relaxed, lovely village, well organised camping. The only thing that to my mind wasnt quite right was the PA was always way too low. For example watching The Devil’s Interval (a great trio of singers), from the back both the girl’s voices were indistinct from each other and seemed to be drowned out by the bloke’s voice. When I went down the front to take some photos and stood in front of the speakers, you could hear it all. Mind you for a change I could stand in front of the speakers without having my brains blown out by the sound.

Speaking to some people here at Bideford, they had the same problem too with the sound at Dartmoor.

This was written at Sidmouth but I couldnt get it to post.

I’ve spoken to a few more people here who are all season ticket holders and they say they are having trouble getting into a few of the concerts. The programme explains that entry to the events is advance event ticket holders (i.e. people who have paid separately for the event) first, then season ticket holders, if anything left then they can be sold on the door.
(more…)

Hello from a campsite in Sidmouth! I’m clinging to the side of a reasonably steep hill in the Devon countryside. If it tips down with rain here I don’t know how anybody is going to get out

Unfortunately, things aren’t going well. Firstly I went to the Bulverton Marquee on Friday night, which is just a climb from the campsite. I was there to watch/photograph the excellent Mawkin, a band I met back at the Cuckoo pub back near Chelmsford. The programme was supposed to start at 8pm, but didnt kick off till 8.30. Which was lucky as I took ages to climb that hill

(more…)

There is a dolphin just off the coast at Canvey Island at the moment, head towards the Lobster Smack pub and hop over the sea wall.

Onspeed is a tool for speeding up web access. This is useful if you are on GPRS (i.e. pay on bandwidth services) as it uses compression to reduce the size of web and email transfers.

I tried it out last year as I do a lot of GPRS access, but found that web pages are still too expensive to really use, and email can be screened using download headers. It was also incompatible with the anti-virus I was using at the time.

Around Xmas it started popping up an alert window telling me to pay to upgrade to get a better version. Every time I connected. So I removed it, and found the web browsers seemed to start up quicker.

But the most annoying part is the email I just recieved saying that the year of service is up. They were going to bill automatically. If my card details had changed I could click a link and change them. To cancel though you have to phone up to their national rate number. In fact:

Please note: to cancel your automatic renewal, you must call ONSPEED. Requests via e-mail, fax or post will not be actioned.

Well thats lovely isn’t it. I sign up online but can’t cancel on line. I spent 5 minutes waiting in a queue to cancel this. I could write them a letter but they will IGNORE it.

Think carefully. Do you want to want to get involved with a company that doesn’t respond to written requests to stop charging you?

Last year, the UK Film Council announced that it was spending £11.7m of lottery money installing digital film projectors in 209 cinemas.

In return for the new equipment, the cinemas have committed to providing more screening time to showing a greater selection of more specialised (ie non-Hollywood), classic, and foreign language movies.

That was over a year ago. So what has happened? My local cinema hasn’t expanded it’s range of films yet.

*update*
I emailed the UK Film Council and recieved this response:

Odeon Southend falls into the South East section of the DSN rollout, which means we anticipate the installation should take place towards the end of this year.

Pictures from the launch gig from the 17th March 06 with Kids Choir 2000 featuring Hayley Okines have been uploaded, there are more to come. The colours and general image quality for these are pretty bad, this is due to the stage lighting being almost totally red. To the human eye this can look fine as the brain adjusts (google chromatic adaption or von Kries adaption) but there is a limit to what electronics can do to recover. This goes way beyond what camera White Balance controls can compensate for.
(more…)