It very much wasn’t though, went out to watch the first practice, out comes a lot of TR6s, some Lotus 7s, a Dino, and a pair of 3.0 Capris and they evidently weren’t hanging about. So much so two laps in to practice and the Dino locked up on Devils Elbow, jumped the gravel trap, & then flipped over the armco and dropped on to its roof. News was quick to follow that either the car or one of the barrier paddings had also hit a marshall.

It was a very heart in mouth 10 or 15 mins, we feared the worst when heard there was a marshall involved too, but glad to report that both the marshall & driver are OK. I can’t give any more info than that as I don’t know the details, & didn’t ask. NB The final shot was only fired off after we heard both were OK. As ever it’s a credit to the marshalls/safety teams etc who are the unsung heros of many a motorsport event for their quick responses in dealing with this accident, and in repairing the damage to the safety rails so the rest of the days events could carry on. It’s also a start reminder that just because you are behind the ‘safety’ rails at an event, you should still be on your guard and be keeping an eye on the cars when you are close to the track.

In to the afternoon & we were on for some fast close racing, car of the day was a beautifully turned out mk1 3.0 V6 Ford Capri, which sounded absolutely awesome, and went like stink too. Mallory Park will definitely be on our revisit list too, for a photographer, plenty of clear close (and safe) vantage points to enjoy the action, and the bogs were decent too (Donington with your dirty little blue cubicals take note)

My car history is actually a surprisingly short list for 16 years & over 200,000 miles of driving

• 84 Ford Capri 1.6 Laser – slowish but oh so much fun
• 89 Vauxhall Cavalier mk3 2.0 – quick, and practical, and yet boring as watching paint dry.
• 87 Volkswagen Golf GTi 8v – quick to the legal limit, fun & full of soul
• 95 Ford Escort Si – emergency stopgap, run for only 4 weeks, bought as I’d pretty much run the Golf in to the ground
• 92 Audi 80 2.0E Saloon – was looking for an Audi Coupe, this turned up 1 owner, 80k on clock, all the receipts, £600 bit hand
• 95 Audi 80 2.6E Cabriolet – the current smoker, power starts to kick in @ 40mph & then doesn’t stop, great with roof down, just like a pillar less coupe with it up.

I live on the edge of the Derbyshire Peaks, my commutes 3 miles, and most of my pleasure driving involves driving around the short & twisties in the peaks. The soft top is great for just plodding around in the peaks, and as a keen photographer, can also enjoy the views without any pillars or roof getting in the way. Whilst the Audi is quick once going, its 0-60 is 12 seconds! Once you’ve got it going you’ve then you’ve got 1400kg to reel in going in to the corner, with half of it in front of the front axle. Under steer rules. I do start to miss the point & squirt rawness & pure chuck ability of the Golf, I also miss the RWD sliding of the Capri…

One of the reasons VAG stock has had quite a showing in my list of cars is soon realised with galvanised build, they’re built to last a while, and I like buying 10 yr old+ cars that have finished depreciating, but aren’t about to fall apart if you drag them in to daily service. I ran the Golf till it was 19 years old with 150k on the clock & the only corrosion on it was on the front wing & boot which are both bolt on parts easy to fix if you wanted. This was despite the fact I’d been doing 20k a year in it, and in the winter it spent a lot of time black covered in road salt, which if it’d been anything else meant it would have rotted to a pile of dust by now.

Despite my short list of owned cars I’ve been lucky enough to drive a fair selection, talked my dad in to a Porsche 924S a year after I passed my test, and he followed that up with a 944S a few years later, both of which I borrowed the keys to quite a few times. Via the hire cars for work, I’ve driven all sorts the rental companies have sent me, but very few have stood out, the Astra Coupes, Zafira Turbos, Vectra SRi, Astra SRi stood out for going quick in a straight line, but hopeless in the corners. Honda Accord was very nice, but just not my cup of tea, Mondeo, again a damned fine family car, but I don’t have one. VW Bora (mk4) 2.0 Sport was nice enough (whereas the mk4 Golf 130bhp diesel wasn’t), and the MX5, which introduced me to soft tops…

There was a lot to like about the MX5, quick enough, RWD (bonus), and plenty of fun. At the time I was driving around in a mk2 Golf GTi and it was the first hire car I’d thought ‘yeah I’d like one of these’. I could see why it gets the girly image, 18 stone builders just can’t fit behind the steering wheel. When I bought the Audi cab, it was first on the list but for one biggish issue. For a single car it just isn’t practical enough. My work involves shifting computers around, monitors, towers.

the Audi can swallow a lot of stuff, plus I’d got a tower & monitor on the backseat, and a passenger… It’d be a lot easier if the girlfriend drove, I could just have an MX5 then, and borrow her hatchback when we needed a bit more practicality. I’ve thought about the two car route, but that leads to double insurance/road tax, and I know from the Audi, if I drove a hatchback to work & back, I’d miss a good 50% of the roof down usage. It also means having driven it home with the roof down, I leave it down & it encourages me to take it out again in the evening. So I want to try & wrap this in to a one car package.

The downside of the Audi is even with the 2.6 150BHP engine, it has a glacial 0-60 of 12 seconds. It’s quick enough when it’s going, plenty of overtaking midrange, but then it follows it with 1400kg of weight going in to a corner so you never really get it flowing. Living on the edge of the peaks this kinda takes the edge of the fun off of it. Of course on a sunny summers day, roof down, it’s quite nice just to potter around slowly, downside is this is the UK, particularly this summer we’ve not had that many summer days to potter around in. The weight & 2.6 also = 22mph average which while I expected, it’s a good job I only do 6000 miles a year.

So, fun, nippy, practical enough to carry computers, but not for 4 & a wardrobe, and can we chuck in lightish & RWD would gain brownie points. The local roads are short, narrow & twisties, so high speed motorway cruising isn’t a priority, chuckability & mid range grunt is good. Something that can be enjoyed within the national speed limit. Oh and a budget of around £2000-3000, and much as I like the idea of Audi A8s & BM 735s for lots of power & toys for bugger all cash, for our local roads, they’re not the best combination.

So the contenders in alphabetical order

Alfa GTV or GTV Spyder – Damned fine looking cars, interior on the later specs is damned pretty too, Alfa reliability? Galvanised?

Alfa 147/156 – Look nice for family cars, the 156 V6 is worth buying for the view under the engine bay. Again just how reliable are 10yr old Alfas to run nowadays? As another twitterer has already pointed out “its going to be hard to match that Audi, doing it with an Alfa could be a head in hands moment too.”

Audi 80 S2 Quattro Coupe – 4WD, lots of power, I do worry about when that £1000 bills going to hit when the Turbo blows though…, but it’s a 5 pot & that noise OMG! Hence it being allowed on the list, and other Turbo’s not. Also less likely to have been owned by a hoodlum as some of the others would have.

Audi 80 Cabriolet 2.6/2.8 – Manual – mines an auto so some of the performance hit I’m suffering is down to the auto box

BMW E36 323/328i, scores on RWD, soft top with practicality. Basically a quicker version of the Audi & has RWD, but it’s a BMW so you’re a cock.

Porsche 944

which is another one that comes up on my wish list regularly, lacks the soft top, but under 1000kg, 50/50 weight distribution, quick, handles well, RWD, practical, galvanised, reliable, and not that expensive to run. Lucky enough that I talked my dad in to running a 924S then 944S over a 10 year period.

Downside besides not being a soft top is image. I do self employed work, and pull up in a Porsche & suddenly people look at the badge and think you are charging too much. This is despite the fact the car is 20 years old & cost less than their Mondeo. Pull up in a new £30k BMW 5 series they won’t bat an eyelid, yet a used £5k Porsche & suddenly you are earning too much. Go figure that one.

VW Bora V6 4 Motion or V5 – quick, but has it got soul? I was reasonably impressed by the 2.0 Sport I drove a few years back.

VW Golf VR6 mk3 – Quick in a straight line, but would it be as fun as the Golf?

VW Polo GTi – I quite like the looks of the Mk3F in GTi form at least, weight & power similar to the mk2 Golf, could be fun…, and unlike a lot of the above choice may even be frugal too.

You’ll probably note that diesels are lacking, I’m a proper petrolhead, and I like my cars to be powered by petrol.

Feel free if you’ve made it this far to hit up suggestions/thoughts in the comments

It’s then suddenly when you are graced with both in your hands you can see clearly they are not the same lens. For a start the Tokina is bigger and weights a good 50% more than the Vivitar, the Vivitar is noticeably cheap plastic, the Tokina, whilst not of more modern Tok 12-24 build quality, is better built than a lot of other cheap lenses I’ve handled (budget Sigmas, Canon kit lenses etc) and there is various construction differences. One of the first of these is that on the Tokina, the filter thead holder is fixed, and the lens zooms & focuses within (great for filter users), but on the Vivitar the lens & filter holder are the same unit and zoom together & it rotates during focusing (very bad for filter users).

It’s tricky to see on the pics, but on the Tokina you can just see where the lens centre is zoomed up 2mm above the filter holder which stays fixed. On the Vivitar the whole top section zomes/rotates together.

At the rear again you can see internal differences, but I’ve no idea of any difference this makes to actual pictures.

At some point in the future if I’m feeling mind numbingly bored, I’ll find do part 2 of the test & put them on my 5D and compare optical quality, however I’d recommend buying the Tokina over the others just for the improved build quality anyway, and I’m more tempted to test the Tokina vs the Canon 17-40 to see if it’s worth me upgrading. For now though I’m sticking with the Tokina, it cost me £65 4 years ago and it’s delivering shots like this on the Canon 5D (mk1)

Chatsworth Reflected

The usage is backed up in Lightroom too, instead of being a ‘one trick pony’, it has been used for nearly 40% of my shots, the Tamron 28-75mm F2.8 just pips it at 44%, but suspect those figures will soon be reversed. Favourites though, the fisheye is a clear winner, not just for myself, but evidently very popular amongst my Flickr viewers too.

Snout

Like everything on a full frame camera, it vignettes wide open, but it soon goes as you start stopping down, not that I care much as I usually like it, and if you don’t it can be quickly fixed in Lightroom. It’s also sharp, I’ve not looked closely at 100% samples, but The Digital Picture spend a lot of time looking at those things so I don’t have too.

One unexpected downside is limbs, from the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye, I knew fisheyes were wide, but the Canon 15mm is a few degrees wider in Canon mount and it’s quite easy to get your own elbow in shot when bracing, or your knee, or your backback, legs are pretty much expected on most days. The flip side of this is of course how close you can be to a building and still get it all in shot, usually you can pretty much take a few steps out of the door, turn around and you’ll fit it in neatly demonstrated below, this was taken from within the boundary of the Gherkin in London (about 20′), and you can see it’s managed to capture in the whole building.

The Gherkin

Genuine bad bits about the lens, the focus motor is one of the older micro motor lenses and it’s a bit slow, and, but more annoyingly the push on lens cap doesn’t have quite enough grip, and is prone to falling off in the bag, I’ve taken to holding it on the lens with an elastic band till I find a more permanent solution.

Of course all that is forgotten the moment you pick it up, bung it on the camera and start smiling at the results you’ve got. Worried about getting one? Don’t be. They’re excellent fun and a great addition to the kit bag. If you are using one of the many crop sensor bodies though, I would thoroughly recommend the Tokina 10-17mm fisheye which is just as superb.

The World Through my Fisheye

To begin it all went well, I arranged to finish work early to get up there for dusk, even managed to get payroll done early so I could. Got up to Sheffield, went into the Peace Gardens as they were being turned red from dusk and started firing some test shots, and then it all went horribly wrong, a hair appeared on the pics stuck to the sensor.

I’ve been using a Canon EOS 400D for the last 3 years, which has a built in sensor cleaner which will shift most crap off the sensor, but I’ve moved to a camera that lacks this feature, and haven’t got round to carrying a blower. No problems I’m quite adept at blowing crap off the lenses, I know you shouldn’t, but I’ll just do it manually. Big mistake.

The time when it’s really crucial you don’t spray, you do. Now the hairs gone, but I’ve got a wet sensor. Bad times. Very bad times. It’s 5:10pm on a Monday, it’s dusk shortly, it’s rush hour, homes an hour round trip at a good time, which it isn’t, and the event kicks off at 6pm.

Now I’m not one to sing Jessops praises, but I knew there was one not to far away, so I rushed round there in the hope they’d have a sensor cleaning kit, preferbly a wet cleaning kit. Didn’t get lucky on the latter, but did manage to pick up a “Lenspen SensorKlear Pro” kit for £34, expensive, especially when it’s £18 at Amazon, but at this point the choices were go home, or get the camera clean and cover the event, so took the plunge. Time was ticking on, asked the staff if I was ok do this right here on the counter, this was a good move I think I could at a push use Eclipse out in the field, but the Lenspen sensor cleaner is a tricky to use, and not that fast cleaner, especially not for the mess I’d made of the sensor. The staff gave me plenty of time and space to just get the job done properly and no problems not locking up bang on the 5:30 close time, so many thanks to the Jessops staff for that. 5:35 I’d managed to get the sensor just about acceptable, and head back out to shoot. This kit comes with an extra rocket blower, I’ll make sure I’m carrying this on me in the future now. Not making that mistake twice.

The work & heartache was worth it in the end though. Whilst the Peace Gardens weren’t that successful lit, the Wheel of Sheffield worked really well esp on long exposures, and managed to get some shots I’m really happy with

Wheel of Sheffield in Red

The SensorKlear didn’t fully shift the water marks off the sensor, and I prefer the theory of the Eclipse cleaners, trying to shift dirt is easier with a wet wipe, and I used a swap and Eclipse once I got home to shift a stubborn water mark I hadn’t shifted with the SensorKlear, but luckily it didn’t really affect any shots.

I started with a Canon D30, the first ‘consumer’ digital SLR, a paltry 3mp but showed what a DSLR could give you, and being old tech, cheap. Then the shutter failed so I went and bought a brand new Canon EOS 400D, 10mp, 2.5″ screen (big wow back then), and the self cleaning sensor. I really wanted the 30D, but at another £300 on top of the 400Ds £475, not something at the time I could afford, and the only real gain of the 30D was the better build.

For all the slagging off people give the smaller SLRs on forums, I could never really fault its performance. The only negative for me is with the smaller size and the buttons on the rear, I’m left eyed and so my nose conveniently lines up with the ISO & metering buttons. This unfortunately would mean at various times I’d find myself on ISO 1600, and on a bright day this could mean overexposed & ruined shots. That alone has been pushing me to look at a new camera body, so I’ve been looking at the Canon 50D and 7D for a few months, with the occasional glance towards the 5D mk2, then realising the body alone is well out of budget before even consider lens upgrades. I’d been careful not to amass too many ‘crop sensor’ lenses, but had ended up with both the Tokina 10-17 fisheye, and the Tokina 12-24mm, and both were amongst my fave lenses. Then my dad dropped a suggetion, he knew I really wanted a full frame 5D, why don’t you swap one of my 30Ds for your Tokina 12-24mm? This upgrades your ‘backup body’ cheaply, then sell the 400D & the 10-17 covers the cost of a new Canon 15mm fisheye, and a used mk1 5D is not much more than a 50D. Mmm.

(Canon EOS 5D with Canon EF 15mm F2.8 Fisheye + Canon EOS 30D)

So the deal was quickly done, I already knew someone after a Tokina 10-17 so that was that wrapped up quickly, the 400D went onto eBay, and give or take £50 I’d covered the cost of the new Canon 15mm fisheye. A small amount of hunting later I’d narrowed down my choice of 5Ds. Unfortunately the first shop wasn’t so quite accurate with the description, took one look at the battered hotshoe & the general condition & sent it back. In the time I had to wait, half the other 5Ds I’d selected got sold. Research redone, I phoned Bob Rigbys, explained that I wanted a close to mint 5D, and the following day I had one. Result.

The net of this is I’ve gone from a 400D, to both a 30D & a 5D, and I’ve spent somewhere between the cost of a 50D & a 7D. Not a bad result really. Both the 30D & 5D give me all the pixels I need for printing the sizes I’m likely to need (A2 canvas will do me nicely), both are much better built, the viewfinder on the 5 is huge after 4 years with a crop sensor, wow, and both of course give less noisy images. Might be tempted to push beyond 400ISO a bit more often now. I have no interest in video, and live view only has a passing interest.

OK I’ve lost the Tokina 12-24mm, but my early investment keeping with full frame lenses meant I’d hung on to the Tokina 19-35mm that I’d bought for £60 and is reckoned to be a reasonable 17-40L contender, though this is yet to be fully put to the test. I suspect that’ll be next years upgrade as I think the Tok 12-24 trounced it. We shall see, I’ve not actually fired a frame with it yet, the fisheye has taken it’s place on the front of the 5D and hasn’t really moved yet. As Dale Photographic also listed a BG-E4 grip cheap, I’ve snaffled that for the 5D so it now looks proper serious.

Now I’d better pull my finger out and take some worthy pictures.

Nelsons Monument, Derbyshire. Canon EOS 5D with Canon EF 15mm F/2.8 Fisheye

Two years ago I went along with the camera to do some photography, came back with some great pictures including the rather fun “Synchronised Santa’s”

Synchronised Santa's

which the BHF are using on their promotional materials for the event (inc the application form). Details of the Sheffield event on the 20th December are here on the British Heart Foundation website.

This year I’m entering too, though I’m not actually intending to do the run, I’m just going to do the photoshoot in Santa outfit instead for a laugh. But come along too, join in, these events need support and entry to survive (last years had to be cancelled), if you can’t make the Sheffield event on the 20th, see the British Heart Foundation site for events in your area.

Well I’m happy to say it doesn’t get any more sensible this year, because this year we had a huge snow fall in Feb, and, I already had Santa hats for them, and I had a day off to go up into the peaks to find some snow the kids hadn’t, so this years cards will be loosely based around…

Gizmo & Furby in the Show

Also like to make a special mention to Moo Printing at this point, as they’ve been through their printers twice trying to get the colours right on the cards, as I’d managed to select some text (the cards will have Merry Xmas on them) that CMYK printing really doesn’t like.

Fingers crossed the next batch will be bang on, and cards should be landing on some peoples door mats soon.

30second exposure, tram was moving for approx 20sec then painted the front end in with a few pops of flash to help freeze the front end of the tram after it had stopped. Pushed the raw white balance around which helped towards the period processing.

This shot is simpler than many think at first look. Basically it’s a stationary tram up front with another passing behind it during a 30second exposure.

This shot quickly got back a comment on twitter ‘”Oh WOW! I live about 7 miles from Crich but I’ve never been… you may have tempted me though.. Great photo…”

New Beginnings

nothing too unusual there, but then my mind puts the ‘twisted cousin’ together with William the Conqueror. Quick bit of research says this is months away, so pockets a handful of conkers and puts them into the props for later pile. Last night I finally got round to actually putting the shot together, which is lucky, as otherwise I’d have had to save them for another year again. So here we have

William the Conkeror