First and foremost: A pox on Starbucks that don't have wifi. It's just not on, people. A man needs his connection to the interwubs.
I'm writing this in a Starbucks in Richmond, which, as you might have gathered, doesn't have any wifi. You'll be getting this via the wonderful medium of a tethered N95 (because Nokia phones still have to be good for something these days). This may prove to be expensive, but I wanted to write this up before I forgot and I didn't want to find myself seeing the post lying around on my hard drive when I got home and it was no longer relevant. My stream of consciousness, let me show you it.
I've spent today at the first day of Bert Stephani's London lighting workshop. It's been interesting, to say the least. I've watched Bert shoot portraits of Angela Merkel, and of a horses head and Paris Hilton, no less1. So far the course has mostly confirmed stuff that I already knew, or sort of knew, but wasn't confident enough to believe in. Above all, today has reinforced in me the notion of taking time to set up - you might only get ten minutes with a subject, but that doesn't mean that you can't spend an hour setting up beforehand and getting the lights just so, so that when your subject arrives all you need to do is explore the setup you've already created.
Tomorrow we're moving on to doing some assignment work in teams of three, which should be fun. There may even be a shooting permit for Canary Wharf in the offing (apparently it's approved, but Callum Winton, who organised the workshop, was having to pester a bureaucrat for it, last I heard.
So, fun and games with the larnin' then, and looking forward to tomorrow. I would post photos, but I value my phone bill being manageable for the rest of the month. Tomorrow, I shall find a wifi hotspot that actually works. Right now, though, I'm going to go find me some vittles.
1Yes, some of this might not be entirely accurate. I'll leave you to be the judge of which bits are true or not.
