The night before last I was at the Golden Umbrella Awards dinner.  It was nothing like as gruesome as I feared.  I sat next to a lady who wanted to know how to get started in digital photography!  And on my other side was a Swedish MEP who later turned out to be a Billion Monkey also!

I took snaps:

1.1: Perry de Havilland flashing; 1.2: Matthew Elliott; 1.3: Janet Dailey; 1.4: Mistress of Ceremonies Karen Horn, Dimitar Chobanov, John Fund; 1.5: Alberto Mingardi.
2.1: Cecile Philippe; 2.2: Tom Palmer; 2.3: Stephen Pollard; 2.4: Blurry Tim Evans; 2.5: explains itself.
3.1: Christopher Fjellner MEP BnMnky (the one snap where artificial enhancement was required to turn it from a dark blur into a picture); 3.2: Fredrik Erixon; 3.3: Jan Carnogursky; 3.4: Alice Thomson, Atilla Yayla; 3.5: Undying flame?  Let’s hope so.

For further details of who all these people are, and for the official pictures of them taken by the Real Photographer, go here.

Amazingly, I took no less than four photos where I snapped exactly when someone else’s flash went off, the first of these, 1.1, being almost the first photo I took all evening.  See also 1.4 and 3.2, which both involve the flashing of the Real Photographer.

In general, my photos came out much more glittery and shadowy, and in that sense, you could say, more realistically, than those taken by the Real Photographer, whose activities feature in 1.2, 1.4, 3.2, and 3.3.  Because the light actually was a lot more variable than he made it look.  Real photographers all use flash on these occasions (thereby adding yet more to the general glitteriness of the event), because they have to get a result every time.  But, to stop their results looking too flashy, I’m guessing they also use quite strong filters.  The results can be rather austere, as was the case here I think, but they are always usable, unlike my much more brightly and warmly lit, shadow-ridden, but all too often blurrily unusable efforts.  I hate flash, which means that my results at an event like this are very hit or miss.  Much the same applies, I should guess, to the snaps that Perry de Havilland took.  Some of his and some of mine look pretty much identical.  Perry’s camera, as well as starring in 1.1 of coruse, also features in 3.3, and totally upstages Tim Evans in 2.4.

With these remarks above about flash and filters, I can feel myself beginning to metamorphose into a Real Photographer.  The one aspect of Billion Monkey cameras that I am starting seriously to dislike is their inability to moderate bright light and strong contrasts, of the sort that you get in bright sunlight, or if you are using flash.  And as it happens they are now starting to produce combined Real-Photographer-stroke-Billion-Monkey cameras of a sort I am starting to want.  But more about that later.

If you want to know what I thought of the event itself, as opposed to the various photos of it that I and others took, then I have a piece up at one of the CNE blogs about it, and I intend also to do a piece on Samizdata, sometime over the weekend, with a more personal take on it all.