A gasolier

This is the official name for a gas-powered chandolier! The one at the BCLM is in rather poor condition (!), and we could not work out how to assemble the parts we had, so we settled for this photo. If you want to see some fine examples of working gasoliers, take a look on Wikipedia.

I was photographing a lot of gas-powered objects (street lamps, irons etc) at the museum today, following their recent gas event. Some were quite large, so instead of using the 'studio' we were using Hall 2 at the museum - what a luxury to have so much space, probably 10 times the area I would regard as a decent sized studio! The only real downside was that the overhead windows have automatically controlled blinds, which frequently were NOT doing what I needed, so I used a mixture of flash and natural light. As is so often the case with photographing objects at the museum, reflections were a real problem with some of the times.