Manchester based professional photographer | Neil Downie

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Cholmondeley Pageant Of Power

I've been struggling to find postable material of late - partly due to the fact that I don't think I've shot anything seriously for myself for a few weeks. That and the fact the majority of the work I've been doing lately hasn't really been of a shareable nature.

But last weekend, my son and I went down to the Cholmondeley Pageant Of Power in deepest Cheshire for a bit of a boy's day out. The festival sets itself out as "The only place to see explosive power on track, water and in the air" and it really was quite a spectacular. In addition to the plethora of gorgeous sports cars and bikes, old and new, blasting round a short circuit, there was a Battle of Britain flypast, rib boat rides, helicopter demonstrations and rides and on the Saturday night, there was even a proms style firework display and concert.

Unfortunately from a purely selfish point of view, there were no really good vantage points of the track to avoid getting hay bales in the frame, unless I was prepared to climb a tree or two, which I wasn't!

I understand the need for the bales, but in the grand scheme of things, are they really going to prevent an Aston doing 100mph from doing too much damage if it came off the track? Hardly an Armco! Anyway, they got on my nerves as I'm just too short to see over them and get the contact point between the car's wheels and Tarmac in the frame.

Grumbling aside, we had a great day out and will definitely make a point of going again next year. 

Incidentally, I've had a couple of emails from people asking how I create these diptych / tryptych / photo layout thingys. I use a little Photoshop plugin called Tych Panel  which is a piece of donation ware software which automates the process of laying out photographs side by side.  It makes it really easy to create diptychs, triptychs, quadtychs and a virtually unlimited set of custom layouts. Read more about it, and download the Tych Panel plugin here.