After a few weekends of practice with Dad running behind the bike offering assistance when needed, Cameron's bike riding skills jumped up exponentially one evening and she left Dad standing still! Truly amazing to see how fast everything clicked together for Cam and she took off by herself. I think now our daily ritual will be afterschool riding around the underground parking lot of the apartment building. No stopping her now! (except when people come in to park their cars:-)) More images of Cam's biking can be found at johnsinclair.phanfare.com

Milk (1 litre): $2.30
Cheese (480g, about 1lb): $7.54
Cider (0.5ml can): $5.85
Bacon (8 rashers/150g): $7.50

Here's the one that will make all the US readers cringe: $8.64 a gallon for gas. :(

I guess I have made my point: Norway is pricey. Which is why I question my intelligence for transporting all my photographic gear (strobes, soft boxes, stands.) here thinking I could find a small studio to rent and continue my portfolio development? It didn't take very long to figure out that this idea was unrealistic, even though I did find one Fashion Photographer who was willing to rent me his studio, and discovering the local photographic store had a studio in its basement. Aside from the high studio rental costs, the logistics of finding and organising models/make up artists seemed overwhelming. Everyone here speaks English, yet how to go about bringing everyone together? There was no Model Mayhem or One Model Place to trawl through for models and build contacts. I had done one studio shoot with a professional photographer back in April, this was perhaps just enough experience to set up on my own in the States, but here I was feeling more than a little out of my comfort zone.

So I hit the web and started looking for photographic training courses that I could go on outside of Norway. With extensive researching, I found three possible opportunities for learning more about fashion photography:

Up To Date Academy: Which offer two schools run at various dates during the year, a twelve day course and a more intensive five week course. The most attractive aspect of this school is that it is held in Milan, Italy. Unfortunately incorporating this into my tight work schedule was nigh on impossible.

London College of Communication: Offers a week long "Fashion Photography Practise" course in London, but the next class wasn't till March. Somehow I didn't think I was going to last that long at work without some sort of distraction outside of the office.

(Note: November at Sperry Drilling Services, Norway was absolutely horrendous. First official day in my new job and I walked into the 8am morning meeting at Conoco Phillips to be hit with a tool failure offshore. What that means is that the equipment down hole that is used to measure and evaluate the well bore stopped working, and therefore the drilling of the well has to be stopped until the equipment has been retrieved and replaced. Typically this can take anywhere up to 24 hours or even longer if we have no backup equipment available. A day of rig time equates to about $328,000! Yikes!

Okay, not a great start for the new boy in town but I managed to struggle through it. Alas, I had another tool failure on the third day, then on the fifth, then on the twelfth, fourteenth, and twenty second days. Total downtime attributable to Sperry was 13 DAYS!!!! Normally we measure downtime in hours, so having 316 hours downtime was truly exceptional and technically atrocious. To cut a long story short, we ultimately lost this contract to our competitor, Schlumberger.)

Bruce Smith Photography: I had talked on the phone to Bruce a while ago about attending one of his Fashion Workshops in London, the plan being to attend on my way home from Siberia one of those times. He runs workshops all around the world in Studio and Location Fashion Photography, with his base being in London, and as luck would have it he was having a class in a few days time. Thankfully, both my assigned rigs were in-between wells so I could easily take the time off from work and travel to the UK. A quick visit to Amazon got us (Liziee and Cameron were coming too) tickets and a car to London.

From talking to Bruce previously and watching a couple of his videos that show him at work I knew I was going into a high energy classroom. Bruce, without insulting him, is the classic stereotype of what we perceive a fashion photographer to be like. The constant banter of requests ("move your hand here, look to me, yes, yes, YES!"), the camera that never stops firing, the flamboyant gesturing... all this makes watching him work delightfully theatrical. Yet despite what you may think, all these clichéd actions really do work. Somewhere along the shoot, even when the model is visibly fed up and no longer responding, he pushes again and again and again until something magical happens: suddenly there is an invisible connection between model and photographer, and every shot seems to be perfect.

It's not the type of fashion photographer that I want to be, but his results speak for themselves, he produces beautiful work.

From the days when I used to race motorcycles, I am fond of Keith Code's financial analogy for riding motorcycles fast: "you have $1 of concentration and only so many ways to spend that dollar." This same can be said for my concentration in the studio. At the moment I am spending 95 cents in making sure I am taking pictures without cutting the models head/legs/arms off, or letting the camera fire without the flash, or just trying to remember to breathe! So far I finish a few minutes of shooting mentally exhausted, and I achieve nowhere near the level of communication that I want to have with the model. I need to build a lot more confidence before I actually can produce the results what I want. The ideas of the shapes I want to create usually evaporate after a few seconds into the session, as the model decides what she wants to do, how she wants to move, and we are lost down a road of random photographs hoping to catch something beautiful.

So despite my disappointment with not capturing the images that I wanted to, I did come away with a few images that I am pleased with. More than that, the class showed me how a "test shoot" should work, and gave me the insight and experience to perhaps handle that sort of day on my own. (Test shoot means when new models are hired by an agency they require photographs for their portfolio. As a newbie photographer you can do these shoots for free, thus you get studio experience and valuable exposure... assuming the model uses your images in her book!)

My opportunities for testing models here in Stavanger are pretty limited, so I am just going to have to attend more workshops and build my experience that way. Next up is the London College of Communication's five day workshop in March, which should give me a more academic style of workshop in fashion photography. Every workshop I attend I learn something new, and hopefully I can snatch back a few more cents of concentration.

Truth be told, I was actually on my way to an infamous camera store in downtown Houston when I stumbled upon the Top Gun shooting range, just off of Westheimer. I should have been wandering around Houston Camera Exchange, looking for perhaps a bargain 2nd hand Nikon lens, instead I found myself standing at a glass counter filled with handguns of all shapes and sizes asking about shooting lessons. Being British I have never even held a handgun yet alone fired one, so I really needed someone to show me exactly what I was getting into. Fortunately the people at Top Gun were very friendly and knowledgeable, and within 15 minutes we had discussed what type of handgun to start with, the different sizes of ammunition, the basics of handgun safety, and finally, holding and firing the gun itself. I really couldn't believe how amazingly quickly I had gone from gun virgin to gun nut.

First Round: So here I am, staring down the sights of a Glock 17, with a target some 15 ft away down the range, David, my instructor behind me coaching each step. I'm trying to breathe smoothly, trying to pull back on the trigger as gently as I can, then waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. I'm drifting all over the place as I tense all my muscles for too long trying to keep this strange object aligned towards my chosen target. 15ft isn't that much when you have a life-size bright green silhouette of a person in front of you, but I was focused on accuracy more than just blasting all 17 rounds away.

Bang! The gun jerks up from the recoil of the 9mm Luger round leaving the chamber at 1100ft/sec, there is a faint whiff of smoke, and there is now a half-inch tattered hole in the paper target, amazingly fairly close to where I wanted to put it. I'm sorry to say this, given what the green target must be feeling just now, but I was actually smiling.

So that was it, David left me after another 10 or so rounds at this distance, making sure I was comfortable loading my own ammo and understood how to work the target setting mechanism. I was now on my own.

Of course, 15ft isn't very challenging, at least I didn't think so. I put up a fresh target and pushed the toggle switch to send my green friend back 50ft. Now I really began to understand the consequences of muscle fatigue, snappy trigger releasing, and holding a jerking piece of metal that gets darn hot. (The Glock 17 actually has a completely polycarbonate grip, but even so, your thumbs are pretty toasty next to the metal slider mechanism.) Sure I could hit the target, but what about hitting it right in the center, shot after shot after shot?

(It's worth mentioning before I get a lectured by some on the using targets that represent people, I did start using the competition standard bull's-eyes type targets, but found them next to impossible to see accurately at 50ft. The high contrast of the green silhouette targets was actually easier to see than the black and white circles, so I stuck with them for the rest of the session.)

And this is what stuck me as both funny and disturbing; among the other people shooting there, no one else was shooting at 50ft. It was all close range stuff with rapid, dare I say it, angry firing? I'm not a gun aficionado but the man in the next lane must have had a small cannon in his hands. I say this because despite having very efficient ear defenders and the surrounding walls covered in noise insulation, his gun actually hurt my ears each time he fired. And he was firing into a target only six feet away! Really, what is the point in making the half-inch hole (or in his case, an inch sized hole!) from the first round a little more ragged with each successive shot? Each to his own, I guess.

Ok, I'll admit to enjoying myself, especially after the first 200 rounds ($13.25 for a box for fifty 9mm Lugers), because I settled into a routine and started to get closer and closer groupings. The shooting range claim that they have a complete change of air every 75 seconds, but it was still pretty warm in there. I guess 75 seconds isn't time enough to cool the hot and humid Houston air? That and the occasional hot empty shell exiting the Glock, bouncing off the roof and coming back to hit me in the head were the only uncomfortable aspects. I made a considerable pile of empty shells at my feet during my one-hour session. Note: wear shoes with close tread; empty shells are not fun to walk on when stuck in your shoes. Oh, and you need strong thumbs for loading ammo. I could never get past 15 rounds in the 17 round Glock magazine, and that number progressively got smaller and smaller as time went on. Both thumbs got a serious workout.

So what am I feeling after shooting 400 rounds into a dozen or so paper targets? (In total I went through eight boxes of ammo over two successive days; I went back the next morning just to see if the novelty had worn off at all. It hadn't, although I was more determined to increase my accuracy I think there comes a point of diminishing returns with a working range of just 50ft. If I lived in Houston and were to continue this experience, I think making that half inch hole more ragged over and over again wouldn't hold my attention for too long.)

Firstly, it was all shockingly simple. If I had wanted to, and if I was a resident of Texas, I could have walked out of there with a brand new Glock and enough ammo to inflict my own personal revenge on the world. (Note: the student in the Virginia shooting bought his gun legitimately, passing all background checks.) Secondly, and I hate to sound clichéd, but people kill people, not guns. Okay, restricting access to the availability of firearms to the select few like in the UK would certainly go a long way to reduce the number for firearms fatalities in the US, but I can't see that ever happening. It's in the the Constitution, the 2nd Amendment; the 'Right to Bare Arms', and its a crucial part of the American society that it will never be diminished. But if 32 students and teachers were to be shot everyday, then I think there would be something done pretty quickly. Remember Dunblane, (Small town in Scotland where another misunderstood and troubled man opened fire on a middle school classroom, killing 15 kids and their teacher) and the immediate changes in the UK gun laws that occurred after that? Why is America still so slow to react? You would think that after the Columbine massacre of 1999 that would have made some impact on the hearts and lives of Joe Average, and maybe the gun laws would have come under question and discussion? What will it take? Fifty? A hundred dead kids?

Anyway, my incursion into the gun world is over. I don't see the need to become more proficient with a handgun, let alone own one. Just having it in the house would worry me constantly. Thankfully Washington isn't much of a gun state, all you have to worry about is drunken hunters with subsonic armor-piercing bullets wandering the countryside for a couple months of the year trying to kill Bambi over and over again. Wear something bright; make lots of noise, and you'll be okay.

Finally, a last word about Hollywood and Movies Laws of Physics: you know when you see some sort of gunfight scene in a movie and you think how can they possibly miss each other at such close range? Well, firing a gun accurately and quickly are two independent things. I tried six rounds in six seconds and only hit the target twice! But I guess once is enough. :)

1) My friend Chris Lang (pictured here on the left) gets a call from his son, Nick, the night before the 2005 Colorado Relay asking if can come run, as the team he has joined is desperately short of runners.
2) Chris becomes part of a relay team where he meets ' the Florida Girls'; Cindy, Judy and Janie.
3) Chris needs support crew for his attempt at the 2006 Leadville Trail 100; he invites me and the 'the Florida Girls'.
4) I get invited to the 2007 Sunrise to Sunset Relay Race in Florida.

So that's the story up to last week. As usual, I flew straight in from Siberia, giving myself only 36 hours to recover from the jetlag before competing the race. I really should take more time to enjoy myself instead of manically zooming in and out of places, but time at home is precious and I already have been away from my girls too many times this year.

This was the first Sunrise to Sunset Relay Race, and even though it said on their website they would be limiting the competition to only 250 teams, in actual fact there were only 27 teams registered. Each team should consist of twelve runners, but it seemed like there were many teams like us that didn't quite meet that criteria. (I know if I had to organize a team tomorrow I would have great difficulty finding twelve runners also!) So we started the race with ten runners, with some of the team picking up the extra legs.

CLICK HERE FOR RACE IMAGES.

The race started at Jensen Beach on the east coast of Florida and finished at Fort Myers on the west. In between we ran through the cities of Stuart and Clewiston, ran along the dikes of Lake Okeechobee and finally alongside the Caloosahatchee river as we crossed the Edison Bridge and into Downtown Ft Myers. Each runner in the team was to run three times, and depending on the experience level of each runner we split the distances up into more manageable chunks. Some legs were as short as three miles, others were a more challenging seven to nice miles, and with the average length of the legs being 5.7 miles. Total distance between Jensen Beach and Fort Myers was 170 miles.

I knew that it would be warm in Florida, but I wasn't quite prepared for how I would run under these toasty conditions. My first run was in the early afternoon; I was the sixth runner in the schedule so by then it was an uncomfortable 90F. Thankfully I only had to run 4.75 miles on this first leg, but even so it was a real challenge maintaining my pace and not having my heart explode from the stress of trying to keep my cool and run at the same time. Typically I run an 8 min/mile at 185bpm, and I know from past experiences that once I creep into the 190's I am sure to fatigue quickly. I'm still not sure how I managed it but my average HR for that run was 198bpm with occasional blips into the 200's. Perhaps it was the constant dousing of water over my head and body that kept me just cool enough; without this almost-every-mile water deliveries from the crew support car I don't think I would have made it to the end.

Thankfully my next two runs would be during the night. I now had time to recover, although in a relay race like this one there is never really any time to rest as you are always supporting the current runner and moving forward to the next exchange point. With two runners cars and one support car carrying water and food, there is some leeway in getting adequate recover time, but we still managed to always be together as a team every second or third exchange point.

Somehow things got screwed up for the nighttime legs. We were either late getting to exchange point fourteen, or Susie was moving a pretty good pace and screamed by before we got there. Either way, I missed my handover with Susie and we had to juggle the schedule around in the middle of the night to get us back on track. I volunteered to run two legs back to back, to bring the schedule back into order, meanwhile Chris had picked up where Kate should have taken over from me, because Kate, Cindy and I were all standing and waiting at exchange point 14 while Susie was already heading towards point 15. Confused yet?

The first leg was 5.6 miles and the second was 7.6 miles; essentially I was going to run a half marathon along the banks of Lake Okeechobee. Even though it was now the middle of the night, it was still pretty warm with little to no breeze available to cool you off, but it was still better than being double baked by the sun. At the end of the first leg I was still overheating so I stripped down to just my underwear, discarding everything and pouring ice cold water over my head before starting off again. Alas, now I will be forever known as the 'Naked Runner'. ('Almost Naked Runner', would be more accurate I think?)

I felt pretty good for the first ten miles or so, keeping a comfortable slow and steady 9min/mile pace, much in the same rhythm of the running machine that I have been using for last few months. Judy kept me company on her bike for the first few miles and there was another runner that stuck with us until the next exchange point. Although there wasn't a full or partial full moon there was enough ambient light from the stars to run without my headlamp, although I did switch it on every now and again to make sure I was heading the right direction and to check for boars and alligators napping on the road (kidding... I think.) For some reason I thought that there was a runner ahead of me the whole run. Every now and again I would say "I can hear you but not see you!" out loud, but to no response from the stealth runner ahead of me. I wonder if I was still dehydrated from the afternoon's run and having auditory hallucinations? Maybe there WAS someone there but with their iPod on full blast? Who knows?

Anyway, by mile ten I was hurting a bit and started the usual mind-over-matter battle about stopping to walk a bit. I know if I do stop then it's pretty much all over; I've been never good at starting running once the cadence of my stride has been broken. Fortunately for me the distances calculate by the race organizers were off by quite a bit on some of the legs, and the 7.6 miles turned out to be 6.2 miles. Soon I could see the vague outlines of our crew ahead and passed the baton to Kristen.

Oh, and Lesson Learned: Red Bull + Bananas = Acute Nausea.

So an hour after my almost half-marathon around Lake Okeechobee I felt really bad, and had the good sense to empty my stomach at an appropriately quiet exchange point. Even then I had no appetite for the rest of day, and the nausea stuck around. My last run was only 3.5 miles but would be again in the middle of the day. I was not looking forward to this at all, but knew I could slog it out. To quote Chris's triple shot of running wisdom: "Don't let them see you sweat; Run through the pain; Puke if you have to." ☺

So the time to run finally arrived for me. I took the relay baton from Cindy and made my way down the road. It wasn't long before the RBB nausea kicked in again, and despite my best efforts I had to walk. Again, without the excellent support of my other runners I would not have made it in a reasonable time. They stopped every half a mile to give me water, and were never far away from me. Even though I was running and walking every 0.2 miles, I still managed to hand the baton over to Kristen for the last time within 35 minutes of starting; 10min/miles was not bad considering how bad I felt.

So to cut a long story short, we crossed the finished line in Fort Myers some 31 hours and 21 minutes after Judy crossed over the start line. Unofficial results were that we were 2nd in our class, and 9th overall, but the Sunrise to Sunset website has still to post official results. Either way, I think we all had a great time and regardless of our placement we all went home better for the experience. Thanks to everyone for making it such a great race! Maybe I'll organise one on my island next year?

Next relay? Colorado Relay assuming it fits into my work schedule. ☺

CLICK HERE FOR RACE IMAGES.

Runners: Judy, Kate, Susie, Cindy, Kristen, Shannon, Jeane, Janie, Chris.
Drivers: Carol, Zucy
Support: Macguire

Statistics:
I ran 20.14 miles in 3:11:00
Average Speed: 9:30min/miles or 6.32mph
Average HR:1 86bpm
Max HR: 206bpm
Calories Burned: 3187cals

Team: 170 miles in 31:21:00
Average Speed: 11.07min/miles or 5.42mph

Therefore if an opportunity comes along to do something different, much like the Nizhnevartovsk Dog Show last October, I jump on it. So when one of my work colleagues, Veronika, asked if I would be interested in attending a local fashion show, I didn't hesitate. (A select few people at work know that I am a keen amateur photographer, so Veronika asked me if I would take photos of her friend, Marina, who was modeling in the show.)

One of the benefits of this sort of event is that no one is paying me to be there, therefore I have no responsibility to produce anything of quality. I could shoot the whole evening and if nothing good comes out of it, I wouldn't be too upset and neither would anyone else. Like everything; practice makes perfect. Or as Pat Parelli would say, "Perfect practice makes perfect." The more experience I get, the more versatile photographer I will be, and maybe perhaps in the future I can actually make a living as a photographer? Although Suzanne Salvo writes a very honest blog entry about becoming a Pro Photographer that certainly should be force-fed to every bright-eyed undergraduate photographic student. :-)

I had never shot inside a huge theatre before, nor had I really used my flashgun in any sort of shoot like this. Coincidently enough, just before leaving home I had bought a hot-shoe extension cable, and a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce diffuser (I am slowly building my equipment levels in preparation for some photographic workshop I am attending this year. More on that later...). So I went along with my slightly-too-slow-for-this-job, 18-200mm f/3.5 - f/5.6 DX VR lens (What I really really want is the 70-200mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S VR. Santa, Are you listening?), the SB-600 and of course my Nikon D200 to mount everything on. Thankfully Marina had got us third row seats so we were close enough for the flash to have some effectiveness. Had we been in row forty-five, or in the balcony, then the evening's results would have been quite different.

This basis of the show was different than I expected. When someone says 'fashion show', you immediately think of a catwalk, beautiful leggy models and lots of fashionable people study what next years fashion might be. That, and a thousand flashguns going off with enough expensive fast glass to clear off a good chunk of Africa's national debt.

Alas, nothing like that here. The runway was the stage. The models were local people from all walks of life, and obviously for some, the first time on stage. The fashionable people were about eight hundred to a thousand local residents of Nizhnevartosk, and 95% were way more fashionable than me. As far as a thousand flashes going off, well, there was me and a couple of other serious photographers. I think I made up for the discrepancy by shooting almost constantly throughout the three hour evening. My sincere apologies go out to the two rows in front of me. It can't have been much fun being perpetually blasted by light all evening. Oh well, no one turned around to complain, I would have stopped or moved had I been too annoying.

So, initially I wasted a bunch of time getting used to what I could and couldn't shoot. I soon discovered which parts of the stage were too far away or poorly lit, and therefore waited until the model moved into an appropriate area of the stage. I found the diffuser sap too much energy from the flash, so quickly removed that. I then dialed down the exposure nearly one stop to reduce blowing out the facial features with too much flash. Once I got the basics figured out, it was then a constant string of setting tweaks as the lighting changed between sets of models, dancers and singers. I'm not one to chimp (reviewing shots on the camera LCD screen...."Ooo, ooo, ooo ooo...that's a good one!" Think of monkey sounds...) all the time, but I did a fair amount of editing and reviewing between model sets. Most important issue was sharpness of the image; I knew that 1/60 sec was just too slow, especially for the dancers. The DX lens did a good job of focusing in low light and I didn't notice it 'hunting' for focus too often. Still, there were a fair amount of images that were slightly out of focus, or with a blurry hand/hair. Even so, after five hundred images I managed to edit down to thirty that I am happy with; a much better cull rate than I am used to.

For the gallery of the evening's shoot goto: www.johnsinclairphotography.com.

Highlights of the evening:

The Young Ballroom Dancers: Wow, these kids were perhaps eight or ten years old, but totally professional. My favorite image (above) of the whole evening is of one couple; a chance shot with the boy looking towards me with such a serious face, and the girls head turned away. It's a little blurry but that gives the image movement, and anyway these guys were moving FAST across the stage.

The Wedding Dresses: Out of all the models on stage it was obvious that the only women that had any training or experience were a couple of the wedding dress models. They carried themselves across the stage and showed off the wedding designs superbly. Even at the very end, when the organizers of the fashion show were giving out awards and flowers to EVERYONE (and taking FOREVER about it), they stood there, with perfect smiles and elegant postures, never wavering from their assigned task of looking beautiful.

Conclusion: This was the most fun I have had with the D200 for a long time. It's always cool to challenge yourself and work hard to achieve something of value. (Although it took a while for my right hand to return to full functionality, the flash-gun adding more weight and a different balance point that I am used to holding for extended periods.) And I have come to realize that I am happiest shooting people, so with that in mind I have been in discussion with a fashion photographer based in LA to help me develop my skills further. For two days he is going to teach me everything he knows about fashion photography; from setting up a studio, how to work with models, lighting, editing...the whole nine yards. This is happening in a couple of weeks, so be sure to check back for the results of our private workshop.

And in June I am spending three intensive weeks at the Maine Photographic Workshops, located funnily enough in Maine. They have a fantastic selection of weeklong courses throughout the summer for all levels and disciplines of photographers. I had initially wanted to attend the 12-Week Summer Residency, but the realities of finding someone to cover me at work put a stop to that idea. Anyway, between the Fashion/Portraiture Workshop in April and the B&W Digital Darkroom, Studio Lighting for Film & Digital, and Collaborative Portraits workshops I should be saturated enough with learning new skills for a while.

Oh and best of all, the evening ended with going to a nice coffee shop called La Gourmet and eating two huge slices of cheesecake. (Thanks, Kotenok!)