Film Screenings, Planes and Concerts

As I said in my previous post, I was planning to hold a film screening up in Manchester, to showcase my latest film and the films of some good friends of mine. On Sunday, 10th July, this event took place. I don't have any pictures of this event, sadly, as I was a bit busy presenting it at the time. I might be an OK photographer, but being able to shoot my own pictures while doing something else is way beyond me!

Anyway, the venue for this event was the Cresta Court Hotel in Altrincham, and myself, Richard (another keen photographer, and good friend of mine, as regular readers will know) and Helena (another very good friend) arrived at about 4.15, ready to set the room up and generally prepare. You can ask either of them, on that particular journey to Altrincham I was VERY nervous, but they kept talking to me about various topics and the nerves disappeared, til we arrived.

It was an easy setup, plug my laptop into the mains, plug the laptop into the projector, and plug the speakers into the laptop, check the DVD worked and I was good to go. People began to arrive and in the end there were roughly 30 people in attendance, a great result for me, and we began proceedings.

After the first introduction, the nerves disappeared completely, and it was just like talking to a group of my friends. Which, to be fair, it actually was! All the films played no problem, and I think it was a great success. But then I'm biased, so I'll let people who were there pass comment :)

Anyway, we wrapped up the evening and headed out. By that point Helena and I were quite hungry, so we decided to grab some food. It is here that I learnt the art of the spontaneous photo shoot, the value of smartphones in certain situations, and to ALWAYS bring a camera, even if you're hosting an event and probably won't need one!

Richard had an idea, since we'd been talking about it earlier, to go to the Runway Visitor Park at Manchester Airport. This is where the smartphone came in handy, I was able to look up the postcode and opening times, and we set off.

I'd never been to this bit of the airport before, and it was actually a really enjoyable experience. It's basically an open air area with various exhibits, and obviously places to stand, watch and photograph the planes. We enjoyed a good hour there, I think, before we had to leave, and I REALLY want to go back for a day, because I've found I quite enjoy taking pictures of planes.

This is one I'm pretty proud of:

As well as this one:

This one, I hadn't realized there was a plane in the sky as well as the one on the ground:

The rest of those shots can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45456370@N02/sets/72157627169677512/with/5926664726/

So, after all that, you'd think I'd be taking a break from pointing a camera at stuff? Oh no, I went to 2011 Live, an open air concert that was held in one of our local parks. I'll write more on that in the next blog, but to give you a preview, I'll tell you that, that was the day I learnt a lot about photography with a point and shoot camera.