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.

A tale of two Leica's

Last weekend, I had a very pleasant tasting of Portuguese wines at Vagabond Wines in Fulham when I got chatting to another customer who was from Denmark and turned out to be a Cognitive Neuroscientist and we of course ended chatting about photography as I spied he had a Leica D-Lux 4. Finding out that I was a photographer, he asked that I take a few snaps of him with it and later having sent to me jpgs back from Denmark I was blown away by the results. What I liked about this camera, was the really intelligent face recgnition focusing software, the good LCD screen, easy controls and quiet shutter and the astounding quality of the resulting jpgs.

You can see two of the pictures here and all five that I took, each interpreted twice in a slideshow. Jon Wegener is a partner in Cogency a consultancy the works to improve organisational judgement and decision making.

This morning I went as usual to my 6.30 to 8.30am BNI Notting Hill networking breakfast and took along my Leica M9 with Noctilux F1.0 50mm and Elmarit F2.8 135mm lenses to take pictures for a new website we will be developing.

Using only available light whilst members networked and took part in the 18 step agenda, the two lenses worked their magic, whilst the unobtrusiveness of the camera and its near silent shutter meant i photographed everyone as they were. With both lenses working fully open the bokeh and quality of light was wonderful to behold.

 

You can see more of the pictures in a slideshow