The past couple of weeks have seen me spending my Wednesday evenings working late at NPL recording and photographing their latest ‘Protons for Breakfast’ course which lasts six weeks and aims to to teach people of all ages how science impacts us on our daily lives.

Through a mixture of lectures, live demonstrations and hands-on activities the students get taught and shown wide ranging areas of science; from the fundamentals of electricity and light in weeks one and two, to debates on climate change and health issues with mobile phone use.

For more information, you can check out the Protons for Breakfast section on the NPL site, or read the official Protons for Breakfast blog.

See some of the goings on from the past couple of weeks below;

Electrification with a Van de Graaff generator during Week 1

Week 2 saw the students exploring the wonders of light

Listening to a talk on optical illusions and light from week 2.

Last weekend the London Fashion Weekend saw out the end of February and closed the main London Fashion Week at Somerset House. I’m not one for fashion, but this event proved something not to be missed – offering a chance to get up close to the catwalk by selling photographer tickets which allowed access to the photography box, providing unprecedented views of the end of the runway.

Events selling photographer tickets do seem very, very rare – but something which I’ve thought about for quite some time; why some events don’t sell tickets for photographers (even at a premium if they must) is beyond me – after all, the organisers normally always are in favour of us and love the free publicity we photographers provide – maybe they can learn a thing or too from the London Fashion Weekend event!

So, without further a do, below are are a few highlights of the shots I took while I was there of the models showcasing outfits from a whole range of designers, including Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran and more.

As always you can also see more in the photography section.

Outfit by Betty Jackson

From the Swallows & Amazons range

Mecia Simson, winner of Britain’s Next Top Model 2009, showing off another outfit from Betty Jackon’s collection

From the Candy Rock range

Click here to view more

Yesterday saw London celebrate the start of the Year of the Tiger in China Town, Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square. Luckily the weather reports for the most part were wrong, and we managed to miss the majority of any heavy rain or sleet and were free to wonder around without fear of my camera equipment getting wet!

However, even with the luck with the weather, there was just too many people and too few things going on for the day to be a great success, nevertheless however, below are a few photos and a video of the fireworks which ended the day.

Last weekend saw the annual MCN Motorcycle Show arrive into town at the ExCel Center in London. Aswell as displaying the latest bikes and accessories from all the top bike manufacturers, the MCN Babe of the Year contest was also counting down to the final; where out of hundreds of applicants, who were whittled down by modelling agency CT, just six took to the stage in a chance to win a year’s modelling contract and be the face of MCN for the next year.

All weekend, visitors to the event had the chance to phone in and vote for their favourite, however, there could only be one winner; who was Georgia Graham pictured below shortly after being crowned Babe of the Year 2010;

When asked what it would mean to win; Georgia, 20, from Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland said; “I was bullied as school for being ugly, so I want to prove the bullies wrong by winning”. See the rest of the post for more photos of the winner and runners-up.

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With so much of our time and lives spent online these days using sites such as Facebook, Twitter & Flickr for example, you do sometimes wonder what would ever happen to all your data if one of these services suddenly dropped off the face of the earth? Granted, its highly unlikely that they would, or that they would lose all your data – but for that one in a billion chance there is a solution!

Backupify (www.backupify.com) is a service which I came across about a month ago which offers to backup all of your online data from a whole variety of online services with little to no effort from us. After setting up the initial options and account settings, it will happily do it’s thing every day while you sit back and forget about it. I’m currently using the service to backup my Twitter, Flickr and this very Wordpress blog – I could setup more, but just havn’t yet.

And what’s more, if you sign up by February 15th 2010 – you can take advantage of their current offer and get a premium account for free, so it’s worth joining even simply to check it out and decide if its the right thing for you, especially as it’s currently free!