BNI Notting Hill has a social evening at The Electric House Club

As a photographer, I get a lot of my work via referrals from previous clients and from networking. The core of my networking  initiatives comes via BNI - Business Networking International with my being a member of the Notting Hill Chapter which meets every week on Thursdays from 6.30 to 8.30am!

A number of times a year we have evening social events varying from wine tastings to ten pin bowling and this month a night out at the fashionable Electric House Club on the Portobello Road.

I took along my Leica M9 with 21mm F2.8 Elmarit lens using it at ISO settings from 400 to 1600 and in the moodily lit,essentially dark club got some great shots of our members having a good time, getting to know each other better and chilling out whilst having excellent beers, cocktails and wines helped down by a wide range of delicious food.

The Leica has an uncanny way of capturing the subtlety of the light and being small and unobrusive, people act naturally in front of it. You can see more in the slideshow.

BNI Big Breakfast with talk by Dennis Turner Chief Economist at HSBC

This morning over 400 business people, members of BNI, the networking organisation met in the leafy surroundings of the Hurlingham Club in Fulham, London for the Big Breakfast for a bout of networking and talks on a wide range of issues.

Undoubtedly the star of the day was Dennis Turner, Chief Economist at HSBC who "is one of the UK’s most fascinating and lucid commentators on economic movements and theories, Dennis regularly speaks at events for the finance community. He started his career in Whitehall and remains an influential advisor within UK government." http://www.financialdirector.co.uk/author/profile/1378/dennis-turner

 He gave us a lucid, fascinating and often very humorous account of this recession and its possible development for the years ahead. He said everything without referring to any notes, whilst displaying an extended range of the dreaded Powerpoint slides that actually complemented what he said, often changing the slides whilst keeping eye contact with us and never losing sync with what was on the screen. His example of using the word "average" of a person with their head in a hot oven and their feet in a freezer, being on average - comfortable, had us in stitches.

Some of the points he made today were also raised on http://network.hsbc.co.uk/video/Tips-Surviving-Challenging/Dennis-Turner-Chief/1700002150

He really is one of the few economists I would queue up to hear again and will make sure I record on Sky+ if I hear he is going to speak.

I took the pictures with my Leica M8 which goes with me everywhere.