'Fish Fest' - "He's Behind YOU!"

And yes, I am!

Fisherton Street Festival, 'Fish Fest' to its friends and thousands of participants, revellers, customers, everybody under the sun and from far a wide - it was heaving!

The first of this entrepreneurial idea (of one of the street's longest serving traders) had this characterful road, (closed to traffic today) shoddy in places, with independent shops and interesting bits leading off in others, and which links the railway station to the city centre) absolutely teeming full before it officially started!

Too cold to go to the beach and backed by good advertising plus local radio, it soon became impossible to even walk from one end to the other!
Food from all over the world brought colour and spice to the street.

Anyway, I was being paid (a small amount) to video (using my Nikon D7000 and Tamron SP 17-50mm f2.8) a static recording of my friend Gary's Ticklish Allsorts Punch & Judy show, which lasted 38 minutes in total. Gary supplied the spindly tripod, which was used by littler audience members as a climbing frame once or twice! The camera has a max recording time of 20 mins but I just started it again straight after. Hopefully, it'll be up on YouTube or somewhere so I can share it with you but it is Gary's property and he has it on disc and it's up to him to use it to its media potential or just use it for a personal record.

I also took stills of the second show and some promo shots.

I took this during his second performance, from behind, looking out toward the collected masses of children, parents and everybody else. It was young Lucy's first in-the-deep-end go at being Gary's sidekick. Gary is, as you can imagine, in the tenty red thing, waving a paraphanalia of puppety things and making silly voices and noises.

The church is The United Reformed Church and NOT the Cathedral. Only silly Americans ever think that (apologies at the stereotyping but am recollecting from experience). Silly, because this steeple is one-quarter the height of the Cathedral 404 feet spire, the Cathedral is in a Close AND, the actual cathedral can be clearly seen from the road where the church is!

I went home for lunch, downloaded what I had taken, edited a few of the posed promo shots we had taken with Gary and Lucy and burned them to a DVD. I returned to the fray, now with my Sigma 70-200mm f2.8 (as used at the Cuckoo Fair), for band and street shots. By this time, the sun had disappeared, the wind had got up and it was colder. Finally, as the event came to a close, the rain came down. Well timed, for once!

I was thinking of editing one of the subsequent band shots for my Blip but I had already edited this colourful one of the Punch and Judy for the disc given to Gary - and I am cream-crackered, whacked - and feel I should have a kip! So this one it is.

Hope your May Day Bank Holiday lived up to whatever expectations you might have had of it.

Lens is Nikkor 10-24mm