Possibly the single best thing about attending FOWA this week has been the chance to travel on the DLR, because given the time of year, I was on it in more or less the golden hour. The DLR offers views on London you’re going to get from anywhere else, and crucially, the construction of the trains is such that you can sit up the front as a passenger and look ahead. There is no driver.

(Aside: I got a load of funny looks from people, as I sat there with my camera out, snapping shots out the front and sides of the train. It must be terrible for the DLR to be enough of a regular commute that it looses that magic. Or to never see it in the first place.)

So here’s the first of few slightly imperfect shots, marred by the dirt on train windows. So what if they’re a little flawed. They’re still a little slice of London that I don’t often see.

Graffiti spotted in Camden. Fucked with the light levels and vignetting a bit, and added a slight tint for that end-of-the-pier, because it amused me to do so.

Yes, it’s a load of chairs suspended halfway up the side of a building. I have nothing further to say on this subject.

The esteemed head ref for the LRG. I spent quite a chunk of the bout trying to get this as a natural shot (and half decent profile with back of shirt lettering visible would have done me), and in the end, was forced to give up and get him to pose like this.

Poison Arrow and Bambi Manslaughter, of the London Roller Girls, at the start of a bout. I’m not enitrely happy with Poison’s eyes in this – I would have liked the whites a little less grey, but I couldn’t find a way to brighten them that didn’t either look very artificial, or throw off the colour balance of the rest of the shot.

Dolly BustHer, skating for Team Pink at the London Roller Girls inaugural bout. I think this once captures a certain spirit of the thing, and is a decent opening for a few shots from the bout. I found shooting at the bout to be an utter bastard, as the one lens I’ve got that has enough zoom to let me get close the action is a zoom that has no anti-shake, and fairly narrow aperture and depth of field at full zoom, but as I said to someone (whose name I have forgotten) at the event who was remarking on the drawbacks of my chosen lens, while I have to take fifty shots to get one usable one, the scattered few like this I get with that lens are generally worth the suffering.

Hardly my best ever photo. Still, it’s a man with lightning up his arse. Who doesn’t love a picture of a man with lightning up his arse?

Still working through the White Mischief backlog, and here’s the last of the lead singers, Toby of Kunta Kinte, one of the organisers of the night. Not got very much to say about this one.

I also have a small collection of photos that I’ll put up in the next day or two from a couple of birthday parties at the weekend, and I’ll probably put one or two of them across here, but since they’re mostly of family and friends, and therefore of limited interest, I won’t put the lot on here.

Doesn’t work are full res, but it’ll do for a web shot. Common wisdom regarding concert photography is that microphones and their stands are bad things to have in shot, but I rather like them here.

For the avoidance of doubt, though: Charlie (pictured) is actually very tall, not some strange midget, as this photo might make him look.

Y’know, I’ve had to disclaim two things about this shot. Perhaps that ought to tell me something…

A shot of our hostess for the night, Mysti Vine. I can’t quite decide how I feel about this – either the shot is a sucess because of the way her eyes stand out of the picture, or the fact that they do is ruining it. I honestly don’t know. I suppose they are, at least, striking.

This is perhaps a fairly extreme example of my tendency to leave lots of space in my photos of people – I tend to allow a person at most two thirds of the frame, and I tend to prefer it if they’re kept down to a third of the frame. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do conventional portraiture very often, because I don’t like shots that are just about the person in them. A little more space in the shot is my attempt to remind the viewer that the subject exists in a wider context…