Montgomery Castle 800 Years

1^st October 2023, 800 years after the building of Montgomery’s historic castle and it’s raining. Today is the day where community and visitors come together to celebrate the 800-year anniversary of the castle – all due to take place on the grounds of the castle itself at 10am on this day 1^st October 2023.

What a shame about the weather but in good ole Monty fashion, we never rely on the weather to have a good time and today is no exception, a quick rearrangement of plans by the organisers – a very obliging Town Hall admin team and the celebrations are relocated to the upper floor where proceedings can now take place.

Yours truly is here today in a musical capacity and if I have chance, a photographical capacity as well but as it turns out, there was not much chance to take on too much photography work as the morning was spent trying to work out where our band ‘Monty Folk’ would be playing from. Luckily the band members could project the sound across the hall well enough while I started to get the PA system in place – proceedings started very quickly – the parade quickly marched (read very quickly) from the Institute to the Town Hall in the pouring rain. My poor wife who was in charge of the go-pro tried to capture as much as she could walking backward while not tripping over or crashing into anyone then there was the challenge of the lighting in the Town Hall.

On a normal day the lighting can be a challenge in the town hall, on this overcast day, it became a choice of using high ISO and wide aperture knowing there will be a bit of work to do in post-production to have the images looking good. Then came the next challenge, the camera Sue was using managed to get an internal lens fog, never come across that before. The hall had no airflow and was filled with people, it was a humid day and a room full of breathing people was not good for lenses. Luckily, I had my other camera with me, so a quick swap and we were back in action.

All in all, a very memorable and well organised day by the '800' committee; some technical challenges to overcome photographically (Even where we had to gaffer tape the go-pro to the stage to capture Sally Gartell) but that is what photography is all about. :D 

All the equipment used was intentionally meant for an open-air event, no lights, no flash for photographic or video work, in fact ideally, we would have taken the Sony camcorder with us, pro mic and 10bit broadcast quality recording ability – hey-ho, maybe for the 801-year celebration we’ll be more prepared! :)