Helen Stephenson's Brighton Pictures, September 14th, 2007

Brighton, as befits a town with its Regency past, has elaborate lamp posts. For some reason, the lamps were switched on in the middle of the afternoon, so I made use of the photo opportunity.

There is a little electric light railway running along the shoreline. Despite it being September, and the tourist season being at an end, we saw both this double unit and a single unit plying their trade on the rails.

Our first stop of the afternoon was the SeaLife Centre. I'd checked beforehand and it's wheelchair friendly. The main entrance has steps, so wheelchairs access the Centre by taking a ramp down to the shoreline and going along a paved area to an entrance which goes through a tunnel under the road. This entrance was not well signposted and I had to do some advance reconnoitring to locate exactly where it was before Stephen followed with Jessie's wheelchair.

I paid full price to get in, while Jessie got a sizeable disabled discount, and Stephen got in for free as Jessie's attendant. although she has a wheelchair which can be operated by the person in the chair, Stephen always acts as her attendant and pushes it for her.

Once inside, we found that the place was fairly wheelchair friendly. There were one or two stepped areas with wheelchair/pushchair bypasses, and there were a few doors to negotiate where an extra attendant to hold the door open was helpful.

Light levels were quite low, and I decided to forsake 21st Century technology for 1970s technology in the form of my 50mm prime lens, whose aperture opens up to f1.7 and makes hand-held photography possible. The trade-off is that autofocus wasn't around in the 1970s, so I had to do my own focussing. I also suspect that I knocked the shake reduction switch off, as I had a high percentage of failures and didn't think to check whether they were due to not using shake reduction.

I was shooting in RAW+JPEG, which fills up a card pretty quickly, and as I'd forgotten to bring the Jobo Giga One, I made good use of the 'delete' button on the camera to get rid of those blurry shots! I found out something really neat that I'd not noticed before: the 'delete' button on the K10D has a small raised mark on it so that you can feel when you've got the right button in subdued lighting.

The lighting was variable from tank to tank and I quickly decided not to try and get the white balance right. As I was shotting RAW+JPEG, I had the camera's original data and was able to adjust the colour when I got home. The camera got it right surprisingly often when left in auto white balance mode.

There was a tank in the centre of the Victorian gallery where there were numerous young rays. There were much larger rays in one of the side tanks.

These are pictures of two different crabs. One posed for its photo, and then the other one jostled it out of the way and posed in front of me. There was odd lighting in their tank and I couldn't remember by today exactly what colour they looked, so I left them as the camera saw them.

We walked through a perspex tunnel and I took the next two shots from there. The sharks were hard to photograph as they moved so quickly. This one was my best effort. I also saw a huge turtle while in the perspex tunnel, but the underside of a turtle doesn't make an interesting picture!

We emerged from the SeaLife Centre when they closed at 6pm, and we took a little stroll along the Pier. It was quite windy and Jessie found it a bit chilly and wanted Stephen to park her wheelchair in a sheltered place.

I did a good impression of a kid in a candy store: we found a sweet shop on the Pier and Stephen wanted to know if I wanted some rock. I went in and although I didn't end up buying long candy canes of rock, I did get some rock pieces, plus a couple of different varieties of humbugs, peanut brittle, and a rare find: some noughat which didn't contain egg. I was really pleased to find that as I love noughat.

Here is the view from the Pier back towards Brighton. There were even a few hardy souls in the water! As you can see, Brighton is pretty built-up, but most of the buildings along the front do not exceed four storeys.

The Pier lacked substantial nourishment at 6pm - particularly as one of us was finding it chilly and wanted to be in out of the wind, so we retraced our steps back off the Pier and crossed the road and went into Burger King. As Stephen and I had skipped lunch, we had built up quite a hunger and each tucked into a Double Whopper. I love the chance to go into BK as I love their flame grilled burgers and the generous amount of salad on their burgers.

I was sitting with my back to the window (something I commonly do as I don't like bright light) and therefore missed the fact that the lights were coming on out on the Pier. By the time I noticed, it was ideal photography time and my tripod was a slog up the hill in the car.

As a result, most of my twilight pictures turned out to be post-twilight and lacked sky colour.

Although it was Friday evening, the funfair on the Pier didn't stay open late, and between taking the picture on the left and the one on the right, they had started turning out the lights on the rides.