Carnaval Del Pueblo, 2007 – London
Last weekend was Carnaval Del Pueblo – Europe’s biggest Latino festival. It was so much fun! The weather was pretty Latino as well.
During preparations
The guy below seemed annoyed I was taking his picture – he was babbling in Spanish and all I heard was ‘fhsdfhsf camera fhisddfwer’. From his tone I don’t think he was too happy. Oops.
The man below was very cool – he was showing me various moves.
He took off his glasses and posed again : )
Hm, focus is a little off but he’s still cute!
I was mean to this guy. He couldn’t get his trousers done up and I thought it was a pretty funny sight so I loitered around hoping I could get a better snap. The poor man was embarrassed and went behind a trailer 
How funky is this body paint?
The guy rocked – he did some jumps for me!
It’s funny how photographers all love to take the same pictures.
As per usual, there was a large police presence
How they wore these costumes in 30 degree heat, I have no idea.
The procession began
Can you spot me in the reflection?
And here too.
Some funky moves
Rarrr.
I love body paint.
It was quite amusing – they hadn’t blocked the entire road off so the opposite side of the street was full of cars at a standstill. People weren’t very impressed.
Ahh there’s too much reflection here to see the woman properly, but she looked super annoyed.
This man looked incredibly fed up so I tried to sneak a picture, but he saw me and started laughing.
Pissed off bus driver
Coach driver decided to take his own pictures
This guy came right up close to me and started flamenco dancing around me. He was so close I had to step back to get him in focus. I like this shot.
Hm, you can’t see it too well here, but these shoes must have been ridiculous to walk in. There was a whole group of them wearing them.
Knife-throwing
I was surprised they were allowed to do that so close to the public but it was pretty good stuff!
How cruel to dress a baby in this in the sweltering heat
And.. that’s it!
A long blog yet again – so thanks if you got to the end! I took so many pics I didn’t even bother looking through them all properly or else it would have taken forever and I don’t have the patience 
I want to go to South America.
How interesting. I was looking at my site statistics and the key words that bring people to my site when using search engines. It appears that doing a Google search for ‘sex pics in odd places‘ brings up my site as the top result! one of the results! (OK it was top until yesterday ¬_¬)
Lovely.
EDIT – OK it’s back to 1 – but then since I’ve just mentioned it in this blog it’s bound to come up now even if it didn’t before – doh. Oh well!
My Nikon EM seems to be playing up lately. The light meter hasn’t been working for a while but images usually turn out decent. Now the batteries have stopped working so I used the M90 setting which resulted in a few decent pictures, but the rest of the roll (Ilford FP4 – 125) was completely screwed up.
Example of said screwness:
Disappointing – particularly since she didn’t want me to take her picture and held the placard in front of her face, then slowly lowered it thinking I may have gone, but being the sneaky, devious photographer that I am, I waited and.. SNAP. Only her eyes were visible – I loved it.
Attempt to fix picture in GIMP (curves, levels, contrast, despeckling, sharpening blah blah):
As you can see, my hearty attempt just doesn’t cut it – the picture couldn’t be saved with any amount of editing 
Feel free to prove me wrong though!
Some of the more decent pictures:
Brian Haw taking a nap, or avoiding talking to me. I do like this one.
There always seems to be random protests in Parliament Square like this one about pensions..
.. and this one
The man just sat there in a suit with those signs. I crossed the road to get a better picture which didn’t come out (surprise surprise) – he refused to look at, or talk to me. He just shook his head and looked quite disturbed.
Oh, and notice the nice light streak that decided to grace the image for that extra special touch.
These are all negscans by the way, and self-developed. I say self, but I didn’t actually develop them myself 
Now for some street artiness.
So those were basically the only images on the roll that look somewhat normal. I’m going to be using a fully manual film cam (Nikon FM) from now on which should produce muuuch better results.
Back to colour and my slightly more reliable 350D.
Katie
I haven’t converted digital images to black and white in a long time, and when I have, its usually by using the channel mixer tool, but Kev sent me a very cool PS plugin which converts images to b&w by simulating tones made by various film, which is interesting to play around with.
This is using the Ilford Delta 100 option. Not bad I think! Definitely better than desaturating 
She has the brightest wardrobe I know of
I don’t remember who took this shot of me – fancy!
Our BBQ skills aren’t the best
On the bus, these guys noticed me on the upper deck and bowed, so I aimed my cam at them and they did the whole ‘I’m gonna try and look cool even though I work in a crap fast-food place’ look.
Just another London shot
People taking pictures is always fun to watch
I was seriously considering having a go on this:
Wimbledon this year was.. well the next shot kinda sums it up
This was actually the queue for taxis which was bigger than the queue to get in. We decided not to bother which was a wise idea – there were torrential downpours soon after. Besides, I’d already had my Andy Roddick fix for the summer 
On the way to the station we came across this guy
His name’s Nigel and I’ve seen him on the Tube before. He wanted to demonstrate his serve technique. This is apparently how McEnroe serves, so he told me.
He asked me if I wanted to sign his cape, so I did.
Then a policeman asked him to leave. Gotta love London oddballs.
Some shots from Dublin now.
One to full-view. Too bad there’s so much reflection.
This was €300
How people use stuff like this, I really don’t know.
Abstractness
Another for the collection
In the Guinness Factory, members of the public could leave messages on a wall. Mine was simple and straight to the point.
Yeah for spammage!
Guinness is disgusting
The views from the top of the building were nifty
At the airport – getting massages as people walk by. This was a hip-shot – not bad eh!
I was also in the Channel Islands for a couple of days, starting with Jersey.
Mmm
Seagulls are clever things.
I was on the phone as I took this – hence screwy focus
I flew from Jersey to Guernsey. I’d heard the planes are small, but this was not what I had expected.
It was tiny! That’s the pilot getting into the plane.
I sat literally behind him
It was a very cool 20-minute ride, with just 3 of us in the plane, including the pilot.
He told me they have to continue using these small planes because the runway in Guernsey isn’t big enough for large planes.
He also said they use the planes to transport coffins from Alderney and some of the smaller islands to Guernsey/Jersey as there’s no cemetery there.
There were no coffins on this one though. That would have been a tad freaky.
Approaching Guernsey
It’s a pretty small island, as you can see.
Landing was shaky..
That brown bag was mine – checking in was obviously pointless!
Guernsey is a very cute and friendly place.
‘Shrooms this way’? I asked someone else about that sign and they didn’t know either.
Full-view this next one!
Hm.. still not found
It’s weird – I saw posters in Amsterdam and now here in Guernsey. It seems like everyone knows what this girl looks like, yet she’s nowhere to be found.
Back in London and back in the office
They were snooping around Facebook and looking at a certain picture of me – won’t say what it was, but this pic says it all to me
More gathered around..
Facebook is insane. What would the world do if it crashed? I think some of my friends would need therapy.
Being creative with some of our merchandise
Wow, long blog once again.
Thanks, if you got this far I’m looking forward to shooting fully manual – watch this space for piccies!
