A few weeks ago I was asked to take photos of the puppets which Jane Leakey makes and uses for her company Fat Cat Theatre Company. She has a large garden, it was a sunny day and most of her puppets are animals so we shot them outdoors in their natural environment.

UPDATE: the entire set of 250+ images can now be seen (and printed) at www.photoboxgallery.com/owenbenson The Jane Austen Centre in Bath organised a Regency Ball at the Guildhall, which I was asked to photograph.

UPDATE 2: the video I shot is now online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NTDs1F53Y

There were over 100 people at the Ball, all in costume, all having a wonderful time, which makes it easy to take good photos :)

I shall be photographing the Jane Austen Festival in Bath this September, on behalf of the Jane Austen Centre.

Anyone following this blog may be wondering if I've been lazing around recently - no updates for weeks! In reality I was so busy I never had a chance to update the blog. That and I've been on holiday for two weeks in Ireland. Now I'm back and it's time to get this thing up to date.

The week before my holiday I got to photograph Lisa and Tim's wedding, in a field in the middle of nowhere, on a glorious day. I've known them for a while - Tim and I were both in a play called "Presence" by Ian McGlynn a few years ago (and I'm shooting Ian's wedding in December!). Lisa was second photog on the two weddings I shot last year and hopefully I'll get to work with her again (she was obviously a bit busy this time!).

This is my first narrative music video, from a concept developed by Samantha and me. We filmed it entirely in Bristol one Saturday afternoon/evening (apart from the timelapse sunset which I shot the week before). We intend to do videos for all the songs on the album, joining them in a single story but that may take awhile!

Gear: Canon 5D Mark II, 24mm f/1.4 L, 50mm f/1.4, 24-105mm f/4 IS L, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L lenses, Zacuto Z-Finder, Steadicam Merlin, LitePanels MicroPro, FaderND, and a tripod with fluid head. I edited it in Premiere Pro CS4 on my PC.

I've been practising with the Steadicam Merlin over the last few weeks but this was the first time I used it to lead/follow someone. It works well but it does need practice to control it - I tried some shots from across the street, as if a passerby was watching Samantha busking, but I couldn't control it smoothly, especially as it was quite windy. For all my Steadicam shots I was using the 24-105mm lens at 24mm and f/8 or something - you can't pull focus while on the rig so you need a reasonable amount of depth of field.

I like to shoot wide open (e.g. f/1.4) as often as possible which means some sort of neutral density filter is required. I use the FaderND (2-8 stops darker) which works very well but at the start of the shoot, even with a bit of high cloud, there was too much light - there's another version of the FaderND which goes from 9-12 stops darker so I'll need to get that.

I was intrigued that we didn't attract any attention while shooting in the centre of Bristol on a busy Saturday afternoon. I assume that my camera just looked like a photo camera so people didn't realise we were shooting video. I wasn't using a mic, and the shots at the beginning (in the harbour area near the Watershed) are all handheld so I didn't need a tripod.