Some of the simplest bits of kit are the most important. I've had this Manfrotto tripod head (model 410) for longer than I care to remember, something like twenty years I should think - it's been all over the place with me, from Honduras to Iceland up mountains and down rivers. It's never let me down. It's robust and reliable, although can get a bit stiff to use in the cold. Then, last week, as I was standing under the M4 Flyover in London, waiting for the sun to set (as you do), I noticed that one of the adjustable thing-a-me knobs (as it turns out, Item number 410,03 if you must know) had been shattered, and in fact the head was almost, but not quite unusable. I can't recall a moment when I would have broken it, I must have given it a bit of a smack - but considering the abuse It soaks up it's quite impressive that it lasted as long as it had.

I was delighted to discover that the exact same model is still in production, and available at my normal supplier - so ordered a replacement right away, but today I've been taking a closer look at the broken one, with a view to throwing it away, but was pleased to see that even someone with my lack of mechanical talent was able to remove the broken section. I checked the Manfrotto website and easily located a serial number for a replacement part thanks to the well designed exploded diagrams of their products, and went on www.manfrottospares.com to order a replacement. Presuming that I'm able to replace the part ok, and I'm confident I can, it is going to mean I'm going to have two of these heads in working condition, but for such an important bit of kit, that's no real problem. The thing that impresses me most though is the service and quality provided by Manfrotto - spare parts routinely available for 20 year old bits of equipment, and a product made solidly enough that it lasts for that long in the first place, but is still repairable by a novice. Hats off to you guys. Long may you thrive.

As always, you can see more of my work on my website: www.rohanvantwest.com

Moving house can be a bit disruptive, on all sorts of levels. My recent move has made me make a number of changes to the way I go about things. Not least, it's not quite so easy for me to drop into the photographic suppliers in central London to pick up the odd bits of equipment and materials that photographers need in their everyday life. So I've started to make use of the various delivery services available. I was a bit curious as to how the courier companies would cope with the challenge of delivering the 9 feet long rolls of "seamless" background paper I often use for portraits on location when one is trying to get that clean studio look (see here for an example of the kind of jobs I use them for http://www.rohanvantwest.com/page6/files/page6-1007-full.html). The one thing I wasn't expecting is that they would fold it up up to put it in the back of the van making it pretty much unusable. I need not have worried though. One quick phone call to the supplier and they sent me another one that arrived, with no bends in it, the following day. So, does anyone want a bent roll of white paper?

I'm not exactly the worlds best dressed man. When I'm on the road with my cameras, things get even worse. Limited space and constantly worrying about baggage allowances means I tend to travel with the minimum of clothing.
I love this company www.rohan.co.uk who make clothes designed for travel. They are light, pack small, wash and dry quickly. Coincidentally they also print my name on all my clothes for me, a pretty cool bonus. My only gripe with them is that they don't seem to accept that anyone on the planet has legs that are longer than 34" or arms to match, and so I cannot wear a lot of their things. However, some stuff does fit me, and I just wanted to let people know they have a sale on right now (7th of July). Have a look at the excellent Hilltop Jacket (over £59 off).
(Yes, I know we have the same name, but I have no connection with this company at all, other than liking their stuff.)

I was recently at a "major camera producers" HQ here in London, and waiting for a meeting. I got talking with another photographer there, who had the following problem: He had recently bought an expensive 400mm lens from a well known supplier here in London, that was sold as a "new" lens that had been used as a "demonstration" model and was slightly reduced in price. This lens had then developed a minor fault that the "manufacturer" was struggling to identify and fix. As the photographer had been honest with them about the reduced price purchase arrangement, there was a complicated debate going on between him, the camera producer and the original store about the status of this lens. The manufacturer was suggesting that this lens was could be classed as "second hand" and so any warranty the photographer had was actually with the store rather than with themselves, while the store were saying it was a "new" lens and so the warranty should be supported by manufacturer. At the time I spoke to the photographer the situation was unresolved, and the manufacturer was not saying it would refuse to fix the lens under warranty, but just that they needed more information as to the status of the sale. The photographer, however, was stuck in the middle and obviously very frustrated with the whole situation. I don't know how it all worked out - I'm pretty sure those nice guys whom I also deal with at "the manufacturer" would have sorted it out in the end, but still, it's a warning for us all.

The call for entries has just gone out for the annual photographic portrait competition at the National Portrait Gallery here in London. Here's a link to the information. The e mail arrived in my in-box while I was out shooting the photo that will be part of my entry this year. I was down in the west country to photograph Jolyon Jenkins, a senior radio producer at the BBC. This is my third attempt in four years to get an image into the exhibition. Fingers crossed that this will be the year. Entries close around July 7th, so get a move on if you are thinking of entering.

Update on the images from my Sweden trip towards the back end of last year. An edited selection of the images from the trip can be seen here http://gallery.me.com/rohanvantwest#100008.

Occasionally I find myself stuck at airports with many hours to kill before the flight. It's never much fun, and often turns into an excuse to eat expensive chocolate while staring blankly at departure notices. Occasionally in the past I've arrived at the airport so early that the more enlightened carriers have been able to move me onto an earlier flight on the same route, even though I didn't have a flexible ticket. The budget airlines have never been particularly helpful like this, but I notice today in an e mail I received from easyJet, that they are now offering to do exactly this, and free of charge too. EasyJet are very keen to extend the amount of business travellers that use their airline, and they are pushing this feature as a reason to fly with them if you are travelling for work. Most budget airlines don't fly so frequently to any given destination that this is likely to happen very often, but it's definitely worth keeping in mind. I'm interested to hear from anyone who has managed to take advantage of this, and get themselves onto an earlier flight. Is it really free as claimed or are there some sneaky added charges?

I spent an interesting evening with my old friend Peter Cattrell on Tuesday. Apart from being a brilliant photographer in his own right, he does some teaching at the Central Saint Martins College here in London. He has a public profile here: http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/51578.htm and is currently working on a project to photograph the descendants of the French Huguenots who came to England to avoid persecution in 1700's, and he intends to have an exhibition of these images in the near future. If you think you have Huguenot ancestors and would be interested in having your portrait included in this exhibition, he would be interested in hearing from you from you, I'm sure.

I'm just back from an interesting trip to Sweden. Concentrating on some of the locally produced foods. Most memorable was a trip out to pull up a couple of lobsters and a few crabs from the chilly waters off the west coast with the friendly and helpful Karlsson brothers near Grebbestad. They run a small business called Everts Boathouse that offers various water-based adventures and are highly recommended if you are in the area. I can vouch for the lobsters being very tasty. The crabs were all put back in the sea to live another day. For those of you who are paying attention and read my previous update to this blog, the new camera bag sailed through security at the airports, despite a momentary panic at Gothenburg check-in when the bag easily fitted into the measuring frame but then seemed as though it wasn't going to come out again, much to the amusement of everyone concerned.

I've finally made the decison to buy a larger camera bag to use when I am travelling light. It's always a bit of a trade off, a bigger bag can carry more equipment for sure, but it's also heavier and more of a pain to drag around. My old Billingham rucksack isn't going to thrown away just yet, it's had pretty much constant use for about ten years, and is showing hardly any sign of wear at all. It's just a bit too small to cope with amount of gear I need to travel with these days. Anyway, after a while hunting about I settled on the Calumet BP1500. It's a pretty standard backpack configeration, but one thing puzzled me. The official dimensions of the pack give it's exterior length as being 56.5cm. This is a bit strange as the maximum length of any carry on board baggage at UK airports is now officially 56 cm. I went into town yesterday to have a look at the bag. It's obviously flexible enough to squash down a little to get it into the measuring bins you see all over the airport these days, but I couldn't help but wonder why there was this apparent mismatch. Maybe it's something to do with a conversion from imperial to metric measurements. The guys at Calumet couldn't throw any light on the subject, if anyone knows the whole story I'd love to hear it. Anyway, I've got the bag, and I'm pretty confident it's going to be great. If it lasts as long and as well as the Billingham, I'll be very pleased.

I was recently asked to take some photographs at a small dinner meeting on the outskirts of London. The guest speaker who was also being presented with an award was Peter White, who was well known to me for his work as a radio presenter. Peter White has been blind all of his life, but hasn't seemed to let that be a barrier to him very much at all. He was a brilliantly entertaining and thought provoking speaker, at one point making me cry with laughter when he told a story about trying to travel on the London Underground network without a guide dog. Peter has never used a guide dog, and navigates himself around the country, and indeed the world, with a seemingly unshakable faith in his ability to get from A to B without too much trouble. Indeed, just getting to this particular engagement proved to be not without incident when the train didn't stop where expected and Peter had to continue on to the next station, and then catch a train back again. The driver that had been sent to meet him at the station then ignored him as he had been expecting to collect a man with a dog. When working on commercial jobs, I can get very stressed about getting to the right location, and will worry, often with no great reason about parking, getting to the airport, access and any other minor detail I can think of. This overly cautious attitude often means I arrive at locations hours early. It wouldn't do me any harm at all to take a leaf out of Peter's book and relax into things a bit more. Rather than try to anticipate every possible problem in advance, I think I will try to relax a bit and deal with the occasional problem when it arrises. After all, transport shouldn't be that difficult, I have the remarkable advantage of being able to see where I'm going and I should be more appreciative of that gift.

Anyone in the UK who has renewed their passport (or applied for a new one) recently will know all about this, and I'm a bit behind the times I'm sure, but recently the criteria for applications was given a major overhaul, and I'd like to draw your attention to what you need to do to get your photographs looking just the way the passport office wants them to look. Before the recent changes, it was pretty easy - you had to be looking straight at the camera with a plain background behind you and no cunning disguises (like an eye patch and a pirate hat, for instance) that could confuse diligent immigration officials in strange lands abroad. Now we are switching over to "Biometric" identification systems the photograph has to be able to be scanned and assessed by a computer. The ethics of this, I will leave to someone else to rant and rave about. Issues to think about are: security, big brother syndrome and privacy. But before you trot down to the high street with a small bag of coins to get your latest photo shot in the "photo-me" machine that used to be in Woolworths, but is now more likely to be found just inside the door of your local Tesco "just next door to you" superstore you should know a thing or two about what you need. The passport office has issued a number of documents to show you what you need to do, and what is not acceptable.

Guidelines for photographers can be found here: http://www.ips.gov.uk/cps/rde/xchg/ips_live/hs.xsl/36.htm

The template used to check your photographs can be found here:

http://www.ips.gov.uk/cps/files/ips/live/assets/documents/ips_eye_distance_template_trade_v1.pdf

If all else fails, the advice telephone line number is:

0300 222 0000

In short, there are now very specific guidelines about all aspects of your passport photo. No smiling for instance, and the precise positioning of your eyes in the photo has become critically important. Presumably as the facial recognition software uses the position of your eyes as a base line to measure everything else. Even the amount of grey in the background has been specified.

Before you send in your passport application it is possible to have the photo (and everything else) checked at your local post office (for a fee, of course). You have been warned.

Just back from a short but exhausting trip to Paris to do some portrait photography for a client. It was my first trip on the train out of the newly refurbished Saint Pancras International station, and also my first trip since the new faster rail lines were put in place, cutting a total of 45 minutes off the original 3 hour journey time. All very impressive really. I didn't realise, but the Eurostar train goes into a tunnel almost immediately after it leaves Saint Pancras, and doesn't emerge until it's pretty much out of London entirely. All very efficient, and remarkably fast, but not quite as romantic. The way it used to be, with trains rolling slowly into Waterloo station after a gentle crawl through the suburbs of South London created a group of people who will recall getting their first glimpse of Big Ben and the London Eye through the train window as it arrived in town, a long time after they have forgotten how long the journey took.

The millions that were spent on the high speed rail link were probably well spent. It's not as though we spend excess amounts of money on transport infrastructure projects here in the UK. However, every time a full Eurostar train arrives at the Gare Du Nord in Paris a large number of people go to get tickets for the metro from the hopelessly inadequate metro ticket office there. With only two operational windows, the queue can easily take a half hour or so to negotiate... Now, it's true that there are machines that dispense tickets around the place, but people coming from a foreign country often need advice and are confused by the various options presented to them and appreciate being able to speak to a real person. It seems to me that making such a huge investment to cut travel time is somewhat wasted if the rest of the system isn't working efficiently too. Anyway, my advice is to always leave Paris with at least one metro ticket that you haven't used, to be used the next time you visit, and if you forget to do that, then passes for the Paris metro are sold while you are waiting in London in that magnificent station.

PS. I forgot to mention that the front of the Gard du Nord station in Paris is being cleaned at the moment, exposing a rather grand and magnificent building (or it will be once the scaffolding comes down). It's worth popping out to the front for a quick peek before you go down to the metro station or out the side to the taxi rank...

I recently found myself at the legendary Glastonbury Festival in the UK Doing a bit of photography in one of the venues... all very jolly and I had a good time - but it did throw up a few problems. First of all, how secure is a tent? When you are lugging around £5,000 worth of equipment you only want to put it down and leave it alone when it's fairly secure. Now my tent did have a pretty cute set of waterproof zips on it, but even I could see that it wouldn't take a criminal mastermind to work out how to break into them. Even a criminal who had only managed to get a basic qualification in tent breaking would probably have been able to manage to unzip them and run off with the valuables. Heck - a criminal dunce could have just kicked the tent over and walked off with the whole lot had he so desired. So the reality of the situation was that I actually spent most of the festival lugging my bag around with me all the time.

The second problem I was worried about was battery recharging. The Nikon D3 battery life is pretty amazing - one charged battery lasts pretty much a whole day of busy photography, but even so I didn't want to risk running out of power after a few days in the mud... I know, I should probably have more batteries - but you know me, I'm a real cheapskate these days and also I was trying to keep the amount of stuff to be carried from car to campsite down to the bare minimum. However, I need not have worried. It's a remarkable thing about Glastonbury - but it really is a small city that rises up out of the green fields of Somerset. The electricity supply back-stage at the venue I was working in was plentiful and reliable, thanks to the huge generator that was parked right next to my tent. Even when it stopped working on the Sunday morning because of a broken widget it only took an hour or so to get an electrician to come and diagnose the problem, get the spare part and fix it. Honestly, you can't get that level of service in Clapham.

My third problem was keeping the gear clean. This is a constant problem even when working in sterile hospital type conditions... and say what you like about Glastonbury, sterile isn't a word that comes often to mind. Losing one of my lens caps in a bar on the first day didn't help matters much either. I tired to keep lens changes to a minimum, but still dust and stuff gets inside. It was while I was photographing a certain Mr. Phil Jupitas performing on stage that I noticed a little creature crawling across the inside of my viewing screen. I tried wiping it away from the outside, but no, he was, somehow, inside. No major problems with dust on the images, but the camera is going into the workshop next week for a good clean. I hope they are not breeding in there.

Oh, and one last problem that I hadn't anticipated. While watching (and photographing) the legendary Mr. John Hegley, I was laughing so much I was worried about the safety of the camera. I really thought I was going to drop it at one point. What a star that man is... I met him briefly backstage as well, and he said some nice things about me and my camera, so I'm a big fan now...

Many years ago, I travelled to the USA with British Airways on a job. I forget the year, as it was so long ago. I think I was on the way to Japan, but I'm not sure... around that time, the airline was charging fuel surcharges as the price of fuel was higher than they had expected it to be... although this cost was included in the price that I was quoted when I booked the flight, so I didn't feel it was an "extra" charge. Then, a while ago, it came out that BA had been working in combination with Virgin airlines (I'm reporting all this from memory, and I might be wrong about some of the details...) to ensure that both airlines charged the same level of fuel surcharge. This was breaking American anti trust laws. I saw an article somewhere (I have a vague memory it was in BA's in flight magazine that the courts had made them publish) with a procedure to claim this (or some of this) surcharge back from BA. They were also fined a whopping amount of money. I seem to remember that Virgin got off without being fined as they were the one's who blew the whistle on themselves. I made my claim, despite only having the dates of my flight and the credit card number I would have used to book the flight with. Frankly, I then pretty much forgot all about it. Every now and again it has come back to mind, but the whole thing took place such a long time ago, I had presumed that it had faded into the great administrative black hole that these type of things often do. However, today, as if by magic I got my cheque from BA. The grand total of £10.74...

I honestly thought they were kidding, but the CEO of Ryanair is today reported as confirming that they intend to introduce charges to use the toilets on their airplanes "within two years". I am still not sure about this, and report this story with a large pinch of salt. Michael O'Leary was speaking as the company announced annual results. The company now claims to be Europe's largest airline both by passenger numbers and company value. The company made an operating profit over the year, but managed to lose 222 million euros on it's investment in Aer Lingus pushing the company as a whole to it's first loss in 20 years. The press release that accompanies these figures is remarkably hostile to the board of Aer Lingus, and is worth a read if you are interested in such matters.
Ryan Air Press Release

Just as I was feeling nostalgic for New York City, the new B&H Catalogue dropped (or crashed or thudded) through my letter box this morning. For those of you that don't know B&H they are my favorite shop in the whole world, selling all kinds of wonderful photographic stuff at competitive prices. When the pound/dollar exchange rate was up at £1=$2.00 I had quite a lot of stuff shipped over from them. For American products (in my case, Norman portable flash units) they worked out at about half the price of buying from the official importer - even with the extra shipping costs. If ever you are in New York, the shop itself is worth a visit as a tourist attraction in it's own right as a vision of high volume, maximum efficiency selling (ok, it helps if you like camera stuff...) The website is efficient too though, and definitely worth a visit. (www.bhphotovideo.com)

How I wish I was in New York City... I hear on the BBC that there is currently an experiment going on in Times Square to close Broadway to traffic in that area - turning the area into a much more pedestrian friendly area... Big changes in major tourist areas like that are rare, and golden opportunities to take the sort of pictures that will make the old pictures look very out of date, and yours very contemporary. I've made good money in these sort of situations in the past - taking pictures in New York (when they cleaned up the Statue of Liberty for the bi-centennial celebrations a long time ago!) and in Paris when they started to mess around with the lighting on the Eiffel Tower are two that spring to mind.

I understand this experiment will go on until the end of the year. Even if it doesn't last it might be a chance to get some pictures that you couldn't get normally without being mown down by a yellow cab - so if you are in the area, grab your camera and get down there! I'd be interested to see the results... 

...and while we one the subject of Rome, Lonely Planet Guides have published a free money saving guide to the eternal city, that you can download as a pdf file from their website. (http://www.lonelyplanet.com) I love Lonely Planet guides, and rarely go anywhere without them these days. 

Easyjet, the UK budget airline’s cheapest flight from London to Rome on the 27^th of May is £178 (about $267). The next day you can get a flight with them for £33 (about $50). Why the big difference? Well, that day, the English football club, Manchester United, are playing in the European Champions League Football final and 20,000 fans are expected to travel. It just goes to show it pays to be aware of what’s going on locally!