The Weekend Again

Another week gone. It went pretty much as expected.

Although a cock-up at Chorus on Wednesday meant a wasted trip up to Camden for me and also meant I was on the train to work on Thursday – a trip which ended up taking me an hour and a half!

Rob S is doing okay at work; he’s hit the ground running and is already getting stuff done. The future looks bright.

I’m feeling pretty down on the world though and don’t really know why, especially since it’s been a great weekend; Brett and I had dinner with Joe R on Friday night. We dined at Iguana next to the Royal Festival Hall and then had a drink at the National Film Theatre’s new lounge bar area. Joe and Brett ended up trying to out-geek each other over Sondheim lyrics…

Saturday afternoon I was at another photographic tuition session. Don’t think I’ve mentioned them before but they emerged through the Out Photographers Group I got involved with a while back. So far I’ve done two sessions, both on working in a studio with lighting. This one was about photographing the male nude and was equally interesting. A lot of the shots I took were crap, but I know why they didn’t come out well which is what learning is all about. A couple of the better ones are here.

At the start of the session we had lunch with the people who’d been there in the morning doing a straightforward shoot and one of them was Michael C from the Chorus. We chatted some and talked about sharing the costs of a studio session in future. We also talked a bit about me photographing the Chorus in action during their show at Cadogan Hall in July which sounds like great fun.

Rosie messaged me as the session was coming to an end to ask if we wanted to head down to Greenwich for a barbeque with Ruth and Chris who’d been over last weekend. We also had an offer of dinner at Ping’s place, as he is recently back from Malaysia and wanted to catch up.

In the end we headed over to Notting Hill for dinner. It was actually Simon R from the Chorus who was cooking as he and his husband Matt V have been staying in Ping’s house until their own house purchase completes. Ping had also invited the chap he’s been seeing for a while, Uwe, a German guy who runs a business in Vauxhall. He turned out to be lovely too; very engaging conversation. So the evening was a great success; the food was good and tasty, the company was convivial. I got to show off my photos and take a few more and then it was a single tube trip back home again. Marvellous.

Today has been less energetic. I spent a while this morning struggling with Brett’s Mac trying to make it let me write to the portable hard drive I keep my photography on. It used to work fine but for some reason now will only let me read from it. Very frustrating and I think that’s what darkened my mood. Other than that it’s been a day of surfing the web (am liking Facebook more and more as a proper social website, designed for keeping up with your existing friends rather than finding new ones) and watching TV (we now need to buy West Wing Season Six, as we’ve just finished Season Five…)