Days 25-27: Lasers, Car Lapse & BBC TV Snooker

Nearly at the end of my April challenge to take, and publish, one photo a day.  Here are my efforts for Days 25 to 27.

Didn't have much time for photography on Day 25 so I took this quick snap of a laser warning sign near my office at my day job. As with day 9, I didn't go into the lab!

For Day 26 I decided to try another time lapse but unlike on Day 20, I didn’t go for a sun related lapse; this time I did the other clichéd subject of a car journey.

I used my Gorillapod and Manfrotto ball head to attach my camera to the passenger headrest and hooked it up to my laptop running EOS Utility to trigger and capture the shots.

I took 731 shots of me driving for 1.5 hours mainly on the M1 and then used VirtualDub again to make the lapse. The music I used is the excellent (and free!) techno track Garish_cyborg - Versalife by Arena Of Electronic Music. Here is the finished timelapse:

I like watching snooker and have lived in Sheffield for 9 years now.  And in all of that time I hadn't, until today, had anything to do with the World Snooker Championships that are held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield each year.  Each year when I watch it on TV I think I must book some tickets next year and never do.

But I noticed that this year the TV coverage, expertly hosted by The Lovely Hazel Irvine, is based in the Winter Garden. And that a small crowd of people would be in the background of TLHI and her expert pundits, ex-World Champions John “JP” Parrott and Steve “Interesting” Davis.

So I decided today to try to be one of the people in the crowd and get a good shot for Day 27. And I succeeded.  There weren’t many people there and it was easy for me to get close enough for my 70-200 lens to get some good shots.

TLHI, Interesting and JP weren’t live for most of the time I was there. Interesting and JP were watching some large TV screens showing the snooker while TLHI was spending most of this time nervously practicing her to-the-camera-pieces.

Here Interesting doesn’t seem to like the shot selection of one of the players.

TLHI looks decidedly nervous before they went live at the mid-session interval:

But once the cameras were rolling she instantly relaxed and looked totally at home:

I really like that last photo so it becomes my photo for Day 27. I also liked this next one of her but as she isn’t smiling in this one I decided to choose the one of her smiling.

I moved positions to try to get some good shots of the pundits but JP spotted me and didn’t look happy that I was essentially papping him.  So I took this last photo and decided to head off happy that I had captured my required photo.