Bon Jovi - The Lost Highway Leads to London Tour

Last time I saw Bon Jovi they closed the old Wembley - they where literally tearing the place down as we left. That was a glorious afternoon/evening of music and atmosphere - shame the old Wembley was showing its age! Eight years later, on a pleasant Friday evening another chance to live while I'm alive, I'll sleep when I'm dead. The only shame was that Bon Jovi didn't appear to have bothered with a sound engineer who was worthy of the title! The Police has managed a great sound 10 months earlier - even if only when the stadium was full - Bon Jovi was just loud - with no clarity. But you don't go to a stadium event for the audio quality of the music - I've got a stereo and MP3 player for that. The atmosphere was great - with all the classics and Twickenham is a great venue - modern facilities, clean and plenty of them. Queuing for food, drink and other facilities was a quick process - and being a rugby stadium the food was one step above the norm. Another sign of the times was eight years ago my rather basic, by current standard, digital camera was considered so "professional" that I had to hand it in. I did get some of the last pictures of the stadium, as every one was leaving. This time despite a condition on the ticket that stated no cameras would be allowed - even phones with flashes to use with their in built cameras where on the band list - there we small cameras everywhere and at least one SLR with a long lens! Now all I need to do is learn how to get the best out of my new compact camera - the 10x zoom was great - but I've learnt that the high ISO to cope with the lack of light does lead to very noisy pictures - and I've got to find out how to switch the flash off!

New Perspective

With the help of a new lens I'm getting a new perspective on London! There is certainly an art to using a lens as extreme as a 360x180 degree fisheye! But even my first attempt produced some interesting images of London around my flat on a mid-summer eve. The most successful was pointing the camera to the sky amongst a grove of trees in front of Tate modern.

From Fish Eye

It also proved interesting to include reflections, it was amazing how close you had to get to a building to make it fill the frame. And then being up a very tall ladder would have assisted getting the image I was really trying for - getting the dome of St Paul's into a close up shot just wasn't going to happen from ground level! Using the lens amongst the sky scrappers of Hong Kong is going to be interesting... Now the hunt for software to manipulate the images beings - and I think I'm going to have lots of image to experiment with HDR - having every thing in view in one 180 degree by 360 degree arc can make getting all the details at a single exposure setting impossible!