"Good Air", at St George's Day

I was the official photographer for Salisbury's St George's event today, set in the city's Guildhall.

Love 'em or loathe them, Morris Dancers do split opinion but they do represent probably the oldest celebration of English folklore still practised today. Sarum Morris here, based in Salisbury, keep the tradition truly alive and I have photographed them many times, over the years and they are St George's Day regulars.

The term 'good air' is applied to the height jumped at the peak of their routine and it has become a bit of a passion of mine to get the best shot of them doing 'good air' possible. Even if this does require lying on the floor of the main banqueting hall, with a fisheye lens (FX lens on cropped DX body) and literally just hoping for a decent shot. True, they could have trampled me but it's easy to see where their routine's boundaries are and it was angling the flashgun whilst wrestling with elbows on hard floors and lots of quite alarming noises that proved troublesome. The painted wooden horse in the top right is a part of a mummer's routine and was part of the this display, hence its partial inclusion, here.

Otherwise, tons of really decent pics featuring cute kids, abstracts taken at max aperture with the 85mm f1.8, court-room scenes, medieval music - the list seems endless. I could not blip any cute kids - permission and all that - had a couple of great tongue-in-cheek very funny ones plus the workshops, the face painting, the mayoral speech, the lovely (lady) organisers and simply many performing friends who re-unite for this event. Pub afterwards gets them together as they come from as far afield as Devon, Leicestershire, Surrey, the Isle of Wight and many others.

It'll now be a mega editing week, with many of these people getting their images plus the organisers for their website. My photos from the 2012 St George's Day can be seen here - this site has all my other images taken for the city council, as slideshows, inc the Olympic Torch and Diamond Jubilee.

Twizzling a D7000, a big flashgun - my flagship Sigma 'gun ran perfectly for near on 4 hours and didn't even get through a whole set of Uniross rechargeabless. The D7000, inc two 5 min videos didn't use more than 2 bars on the full battery either and best of all, the new Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4 was used about 80% of the time, usually at f4 and it produced excellent results.

Naturally, am pretty tired now and so mega-commenting might not take place, at least tonight. I have four days to edit all the pics so fair amount of time, but not a huge amount, so will continue blipping of course.

Hope you all had a great weekend and thanks to all that wished me well for this event - most appreciated!!