"Play Day"

My 4th Backdated Blip.

This was "work", for the City Council who organised this event, which, I believe was part of a National event, held the same day.

What's great about this sort of thing is that cos you're hanging about and around, waiting for the rain to stop/sun to come out/dignatory to turn up/judge to come back from....(fill in blanks) that you're part of the team and you get to know the same familiar (young, often female) staff and ultimately, what effects them, does you, too.

This is the sort of event that I bought the Nikkor DX 18-200mm VR for - it's a crap lens for landscape and useless for architecture, having acres of distortion, but for things like this, when they're really just for the web and some hard drive as a record, it's fine, at least having good colour and contrast. You really don't want to changing lenses and faffing around - kids especially have a negative amount of patience and over 4+ hours, something light and portable is essential. In bright daylight, the len's slow speed is not so much of an issue.

If you're ever tempted to buy such a lens, then please do avoid cheaper substitutes - the Tamron 28-300mm VC was the single worst purchase I ever made and selling it again and not too huge a loss was as painful as actually trying to use the bloody thing. Imagine toilet roll inners glued together (handling) totally inadequate lenshood (monstrous flare at both extremes, where you use a lens the most) and at best, adequately sharp (centre, 35mm, f8). At almost all other settings, soft as shi^e....Meanwhile, the 'state of the art' vibration compensation was as quiet as a knackered old tractor with its big end gone...

All the pics I eventually sent them had to be post-sharpened but still they looked OK after. This is a fairly 'free-fall' event for kids to get interested in local history, English Heritage were running this one and boys just love (pretending?) to have any excuse for a play-fight!