I did a portrait shoot in my house and the set up was still up when school finished so Logan insisted on dressing up and getting into character, the force is strong.

What a day! Big Wednesday delivered. Ok so I only managed 13.8Km but that was enough to put a big smile on my face.

I was at Devils Dyke near Brighton at 9am and got ready, fresh batteries in my GPS and Vario, put my thermal base layers on, had a nervous pee and laid out my wing.

The forecasts said day would start early, I flew around in ridge lift getting a feel for the day for about an hour hooking into the thermals as they came up the hill with multiple attempts at climbs, some to over 1,000 and some just to about 500' above take off, eventually a bigger more organised thermal one came through at about 10:45.

I started a climb then was hit with a very strong smell of oilseed rape which was a good omen because it meant the air I was flying in at 300' was on the ground in the field below only a few minutes ago the climb was rough and broken and I had to really fight to stay in it for the first 1000ft then it started to open up as multiple cores of thermals started to join together into a solid 5 meters per second climb all the way to about 4,000.

As I started my climb was joined by my friend, and very skilled pilot Owen. We circled around each other adjusting our turns to make the most of the different part of the lift, adjusting out circles as we overtook each each other in lift.

A good visualisation for thermals is a lava lamp, the sun heats up the ground which in turn heats the air next to it until it breaks away from the ground in a bubble or column which rises up to create a classic cumulus cloud, the paraglider pilot uses these invisible lifts to fly to could base then navigate cross country. Unfortunately, just like a lava lamp as the bubble rises it displaces air around it and creates areas of sinking air that can have you on the ground much quicker than you can gain height.

My climb slowed right down to 1 meter per second at about 4,000' and I headed off west towards 2 other gliders, when WAAAAAA my audio Variometer, a device which tells me my lift or sink rate through an audio tone, made a very definite sink sound so I pushed the speed bar to increase my speed and hopefully escape from the area of sink and headed towards another pilot Carlo climbing nicely somewhere between Asda and the new Lewes FC Stadium, I connected with the climb at only 450 ft over the deck and managed to climb up to 1200' before loosing it, I couldn't keep up with him as he zipped off inland on a faster and batter performing glider.

I decided my best bet was to try and soar the Sea Breeze front which was just to my right so headed towards the coast trying to connect with a big beautiful cloud in front of me but my gamble didn't pay off and WAAAAAA, sinking sound from the vario all the way to the earth near Litlington.

I landed with my hands up and taking a step backwards, it was really really windy, when flying my ground speed was over 60kph with the wind so I guess it wasn't too bad to be down.

Budweiser are the new sponsor of the FA cup and I recently shot the real cup full of bottles of beer in Wembley Stadium for the global Budweiser campaign. I had to shoot all of the elements for compositing into the final image which meant 2 visits to the stadium, one in the day to shoot the stands and one to shoot crowds to drop in, we went to a friendly England / Holland game which unfortunately Holland won, but at least we scored a few goals so I could photograph happy England fans.

After shooting the background elements it was time to go into the studio and shoot the cup with reflections, I created the reflections in the cup with projections on the studio walls which reflected scenes of the stadium in the many curved shiny surfaces of the cup.

After shooting the reflections I had to shoot the bottles which were prepared by Simon from Andy Knight Set builders. Simon's knowledge and problem solving was incredible and he prepared the bottles and ice / water mix for the shots without damaging the most precious silverware the the country. I was amazed that we were using the real FA Cup as I assumed we would be using a replica but no replica exists, the cup travels with Leon, a 7th Dan in Karate and about twice my height and weight who never takes the cup out of sights, he is also responsible for cleaning and polishing the surfaces to perfection on such occasions as this.

Whit the bottles in place I managed to light them all in one shot using very powerful directed and focused flash so each bottle had the perfect highlight.

Simon rigged the cup in position with high strength fishing line and placed the bottles in a specially created vacuum formed inner skin.

I spent a couple of days out of London editing a film project with my old friend Tom, after a long day we headed out to Westbury White horse where I was hoping to get out on my paraglider but the wind was howling so we opted for Tom's 4 line power kite, that thing is dangerous, I got picked up in the air and generally thrown around and bruised.

I think she's aiming higher than that, Alex Cornes, assistant, defends himself against Lauren's high kick on yesterday's shoot for sports wear brand No Balls.

My daughter Isla in the woods over Easter.

 

My friend Alex of Ostia Media picked up one of the first 5D MKIII cameras yesterday and gave me call on my shoot to ask if he could come down and test it.

Here are his results......

This wasn't a very extensive test, but I tried to push the ISO and give several examples of the very clean results using high ISO. Unfortunately it's not always easy to appreciate this as the video will suffer some compression artifacts after going through Vimeo, but you should get an idea anyway.

Footage was not graded and was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro 5.5. The footage came straight out of the camera without any transcoding and was recorded at 720, 50p

Photographer / Director - Glen Burrows
Camerman - Alex Kryszkiewicz
Model - Jenni Li @ Profile Models
Hair & Make Up - Jo Gillingwater @ S Management
Stylist - Gwen Burns
Studio - Loft Studios London
Assistant - Jim Agnew

In Nottingham at the weekend I visited IN Racing where beautiful historic cars are rebuilt and prepared for racing, on the bench was one of my favorite all time cars, an original Maserati 250F being prepared for a customer. I love to see cars at this stage, a skeleton and organs showing the engine and mechanical parts meticulously being assembled. The details of the original parts such as the petrol gauge or 'Benzina'as its called in Italian, restored to perfection, reflecting the age of the car also but being sympathetic to it.

 

I'd been checking the forecasts, a gentle northerly with a post cold frontal airmass made for a promising day paragliding, I managed to escape the city and headed to my nearest northerly site Devils Dyke just outside of Brighton.

The day didn't quite live up to my hopes but I did manage close to an hour of airtime, the lift was scratchy and wind gentle with the thermals weak and broken as they often are at this time of year without a hot sun to bake the earth.

A few of the skygods managed to get to cloud base which was at around 3,000' and headed off cross country but the best I managed in the busy skies was a few climbs to about 300' above take off. Still, my first day out this year and a good opportunity to blow the cobwebs out of my wing.

 

Clear skies over London one evening last week produced the perfect gradient of colour from yellow sunset to deep blue / black.

After shooting background plates at Wembley stadium I was able to stay for the match, quite an exciting game, even for a non-believer like myself, there were 5 goals scored but unfortunately the other guys got the lions share of them.

Not being much of a football fan probably helped me stay focused at Wembley, I was shooting background plates for a campaign, there's something quite eerie about being in a huge empty stadium, it kind of feels wrong to be empty, like it's hungry. I'm back there tonight for the England / Holland game to reshoot the stadium full of people so I'm sure it will feel quite different.

In transit from Portland to London I had 9 hours to kill in LA, faced with such a long time in one of the crappiest big airports in the world after a quick visit to the observation deck above the sky bar I jumped into a cab to kill the time on Venice beach rather than in LAX.

I had a great send off in Portland on Saturday night, my old friend Steve, a brit who now works for Nike and has lived in Portland for 4 years took us out and showed us the town. By coincidence Cavit who is one of the partners in my rental company WB Digital was also in town on a shoot so joined us.

We set off from Steve's house in Alberta on bikes, as we knew we would be throwing a few down and not legally capable of driving cars at the end of the night. It was then I realised how big bike culture is in Portland. Like many American cities Portland is organised on a grid system but on this grid there are special bike roads where every road crossing it has a stop sign and there are speed bumps to slow cars meaning bikes can ride straight and fast without stopping and cars always know to looks out for you, it's the best system I have seen to keep everyone safe.

Our first stop was a bar called the Doug Fir Lounge which is built in the style of a prospectors cabin with the walls made from complete tree trunks, from there we bar hopped to some lesser establishments eventually ending up in Cavit's hotel room to do some damage to the mini bar, and as so often happens with a bunch of photographers, cameras were out and a shoot off took place.