Jose Gonzalez, St Andrews Students’ Union 24/09/2011 (preview)

Jose Gonzalez played a set at the St Andrews Union as part of Freshers Week 2011. I took a few photos from the projection room, high up the rear wall of the venue. Unfortunately my K20D has abysmal high-ISO performance & the only tele prime I have is a cheap 135mm f/2.8 so they didn’t come out too well. The lighting designer was rather good though, so they’re at least dramatic.

I’ll post a few more in a few days.

Boxing at the Union


One of the more unusual events to take place in the Union, amateur boxing has taken place in the Union once a year for a few years now. Despite >24kW of light from above (we rigged 24x 1kW CP62’s as well as some other lamps, all directly above the ring so that the fighters wouldn’t be competing with glare or shadows) I still had to shoot at 3200 with the 135mm wide open at f2.8 to stand any chance of getting sharp images. As such, most of the shots suffer from nasty blue/purple fringing, which could probably be removed if any of them were actually worth further working on!

Raisin Monday Foam Fight 2009 (56k warning)

Totally only 8 months late. Turned out you had to have a pass to get into the quad itself for taking photographs, so I resorted to taking photos of people as they went in & came out. The ones on the way in were all taken with the SMC Pentax M 50mm f1.7 (~77mm equivalent) whilst when they were coming out I was stuck behind the crowd so stood on top of a planter with the Mitsuki 135mm f2.8 (~208mm equivalent). Vertical grip came in so handy, my arms would’ve been dropping off if I didn’t have it!