Into the dark months

October hols over and it's into the dark months that take us up to Christmas and hopefully the skiing season too. Hard months for trail building as less light per day equals less trail built equals less money! Thankfully there aren't many builds planned for this period (good planning that), what I do have is more design, planning and consultancy work - all office based, and photography work - mainly indoors (nice planning again) so should get through to the longer days aok. I always feel that once you're passed Christmas you may still be in the depths of winter, but as the daylight starts to increase things get easier. As usual can't say much about works in progress, but three lovely wee builds on the cards and a plum of a design job that is the start of a major project in the central belt.

Lewis was an epic trip, in that we arrived at the same time as Hurricane Gonzalo! Add to that the house we were renting was about as exposed to the Atlantic as you can get and we had a few sleepless nights listening (and feeling) the house being battered by storm force winds and torrential rain (kids slept through it). Even with dreadful weather the Uig peninsula was a beautiful place to be and it was no bother keeping our two young lads occupied with walks to see the full might of the weather hitting the cliffs and beaches - having a gorgeous house to retreat to helped as well!

the most amazing foam party ever!

cosy gaf

Just a geeky kit note; I'm using the wee Olympus omd em-1 these days, a family holiday is no place to drag around a hulking big Nikon and the Oly is small enough to stuff in jacket or wee bag, totally weatherproof (camera was washed down in the shower several times to remove salt spray) and with built in wifi there was no involved editing type nonsense, just send to phone or iPad, a quick tweak and off to Instagram the image goes! Can't see me going back to a traditional DSLR anytime soon. 

Prior to leaving for hols had to squeeze in a weekends work for Singletrack mag covering the World Endurance 24hr solo champs. I was sort of thinking of going over anyway, but to take the usual flash lit racers racing type pics that seem to sell well directly to competitors and sponsors.

This time I was going to leave the flash guns at home and try and capture more 'reportage' style shots, a challenge, but massively useful for my development as a photographer. In the end I shot 1300 odd images, slept for all of 4hrs and came away with some shots I was quite happy with, whether Singletrack use them is another matter! Can't publish any of the pics, but here's a 'B' roll pic I quite like. 

Again used the little cameras, omd and the ever faithful fuji x100, both cracking wee cameras to use, especially the fuji for candid moments. Both cameras were cranked up to high ISO's - 6400 at night and all images fine enough for use. 

Geek note here again, the oly has amazing image stabilisation allowing hand held at about a second, mental. Geek note over. 

Anyhow that's enough of that, I'm off for a run as this is my traditional 'let's go back to being a runner' time of the year! 

Bye.