Saturday 21st July
The Blog M Weekend Colour Supplement
As any writer will tell you, there are times when you just haven’t got the inspiration, the enthusiasm, or the will to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. A deadly lethargy takes hold, and you find yourself filling the time with a myriad trivial activities. Well, the Reveller has been blocked for damn nigh a month, and has just this weekend got his get up and go back.
But while words cease to flow, while my muse is AWOL, I’m by no means idle. As an antidote to being stuck in a creative rut I go out and splurge on a nice new camera - a Canon Powershot G7 no less, to replace my trusty old G3. This dinky little digital masterpiece packs amazing firepower in its minute black body, and has more megapixels than you can shake a stick at. But the selling point - the ‘gottahave’ feature that makes it a must for the happy snapper whose stability is, alas, all too often marred by the demon drink - is a fully automatic image stabilizer that compensates for camera shake.
So armed with my little black beauty I venture out for a Saturday night in Top Gun to put the beastie through its paces. Joining my old mate Frank at the bar we prod and poke the new camera, and I bash off a few shots of the bar to check its light-gathering ability. Now the Twilight Zone and the band podium are unlit and murky in the early evening, a harsh test for any camera without a flash. “I don’t use flash because it kills the atmosphere”, I tell Frank - “and this is a particularly good low light camera”. “Surely you mean low life!” he quips back smartly. “Now there’s an angle I bet the boffins at Canon have never thought of,” I reply after a hearty laugh. “Just imagine the ads they could create using that catchline - ‘The Reveller’s low-life camera of choice’.”
So without further ado, here are the pictures:
Eight thirty on a Saturday night - looking towards the band area from the front bar
The pool players arrive
The Twilight Zone begins to fill up
The front bar pool table, seen from the Twilight Zone
The view from the rear bar corner
Wallpaper girls
The band strikes up
Life in the Twilight Zone
Eleven o’clock, and the band takes a rest
Murky meetings
Sweet Young Things chatting away the time
A panorama of the Twilight Zone
Looking down the length of the rear bar
The front bar, seen from the cash desk
Looking southwards down the street at midnight
Looking northwards up the street
My bajay, chugging through Prapanca
The home stretch
As Saturdays down the Blok go at the moment, this one is fairly typical. There isn’t a big crowd, there are very few premier cru Sweet Young Things, and there’s a rather passive feel to the night. But it’s pleasant enough, and a lot of the guys are just enjoying a drink and a chat - there’s not much hunting going on. The band is quite good, and the management very wisely keeps the volume at conversation level.
All in all it’s a good night down the Blok, and a successful photo shoot. The new camera passes the Blok M test with flying colours, and I look forward to taking more piccies over the next few weeks.