Celebrity Snappers: Becoming a Papparazzo, Leicester Square, London - 9th November 2005

Whilst wandering back from Chinatown towards Leicester Square, Nosher spots a small bunch of press photographers hanging around outside the entrance to a club, and asks what's occuring. It turns out that it's the night of the Screen Nation Awards 2005, dubbed the "Black Oscars", with several celebs floating around. Despite not being a particular fan of the cult of celebrity, it still interesting to experience it and so Nosher manages to lig a spot in the press camp, and ended up hanging around with the hacks waiting for famous - and not-so-famous people - to arrive, both at the Ruby Blue Club and the Prince Charles Cinema. Nosher mostly ended up chatting with a photographer from Getty Images, who had been in the "game" for eight years - it was certainly fascinating listening to tales from the inside. It turned out to be a most amusing evening, with some entertaining cynicism from the hacks, and some great mickey-taking of the more minor celebs. In fact, it was so absorbing that two-and-a-half hours later with 136 photos in the bag, Nosher even shouted "Over here please, Danny!" to Danny John-Jules out of Red Dwarf in order to get a photo. It also turned out that it's also a bit harder than it looks: many photos were fuzzy as the low light meant manual focus, and there wasn't the luxury of the professional Nikon that one of the photographers had which could do 180 frames non-stop at five per second.

next album: Qualcomm Europe All-Hands at the Berkeley Hotel, and Covent Garden, London - 9th November 2005
previous album: Qualcomm goes Karting in Caxton, Cambridgeshire - 7th November 2005