Congratulations to everyone who took part in the kilted skiing record attempt at Cairngorm Mountain this morning. I really enjoyed being there to see 235 skiers and snowboarders of all ages, sizes and species (yes!) doing the righteous kilt thing in style. There was a great atmosphere and it was well organised, especially having the pipers and drummer leading the procession down to the finish line.

Read about it on the BBC and STV news sites.

Working in the Highlands, which is a huge area with a small population, you don't really need a press card. Most of the police know all the photographers and so long as you behave yourself, which we all do, there's never any problem.

Today I was covering a fire at a furniture store in Grantown, after receiving the usual media alert from the police press office. There was only one other photographer there and we were both playing by the rules, only going where the police allowed us to go and not getting in the way at all. As far as I'm aware, neither of us did anything wrong and there was no reason for any police officer to object to us being there.

Then up walked Inspector Attitude and confronted me. He was immediately combative. This is how the conversation went:

Him: Are you press?
Me: I am, yes.
Him: Show me your credentials.
Me: I'm freelance. I don't have credentials.
Him: You don't have any ID at all?
Me: I've got ID, I just don't have press credentials because I'm freelance.
Him: (Taking hold of me and pushing me.) Don't give me any of your nonsense.
Me: Excuse me?

At which point someone started talking to him on his radio and he left me alone. Later on he came over to where both myself and the other photographer were standing, and asked us to move even further back, but he was polite that time.

I've known for as long as I've been in this business that British press cards are effectively worthless because anyone can get one, whether they're press or not, so I've never bothered getting one. Plus I've only ever been asked for a press card once before, and that time was also by a policeman with an aggressive attitude who was trying to be obstructive.

Two times is two times too many though. Probably best if I just get the silly card and show it to any policeman daft enough to think it means something. If it lets me get on with my job without wasting time on stupid arguments then I guess it will be worth it. I just hope I don't have to pay some astronomical "membership fee" to whichever 'gatekeeper' I end up getting it from.

Anyway, even with the hassles, I got all the pics I wanted. (I should point out that the policeman in the first pic isn't the one who confronted me. This guy was friendly and polite, as the police nearly always are.)

Yesterday was insane. On Sunday night at 8pm I got a booking for a job in John O'Groats, over 160 miles away, and I had to be there for 8am. The job was covering the start of the Sport Relief celebrity bike ride.

The agency that I was covering the event for supplies photos to a lot of celebrity magazines and tabloid newspapers, so I tried to get photos that those publications would be interested in, such as this shot of David Walliams signing autographs:

Current media darling Miranda Hart:

And some gratuitous butt shots of Davina McCall:

Fearne Cotton kept a low profile and I didn't see her come out to mingle with the crowd at all, so there wasn't much opportunity for good pics of her:

Local school kids had turned out in force to give their support, so once the celebs had set off I got a group shot of the kids to send to the local paper:

So that was the John O'Groats job done.

On the way home I headed for the scene of a road accident near Invergordon, but it had been cleared up by the time I got there. I stopped in Inverness for a couple of hours to do a bit of shopping, then continued south.

And by pure luck, the time spent in Inverness meant that I reached Carrbridge just as the derailed locomotive was being taken away by road. I did a U-turn on the A9, headed back to the first layby, grabbed my camera and ran back along the A9 to get some shots of the loco and the queues of traffic. Maybe there's a good reason for the timing, but I thought it was quite bizarre that the loco was being moved at 5pm when it would surely cause a lot of inconvnience to motorists.

It was a very long day. I got home at about 6:30pm, sent the loco pics off to the papers, had a quick bite to eat, and sat on the settee for a game of Grand Theft Auto. I woke up 2 hours later, still sitting upright on the settee. I'd pretty much been running on adrenaline for the past 24 hours. Went to bed and slept for 11 hours.

Would happily do the same again tomorrow

The derailed 167-tonne locomotive at Carrbridge train station was lifted last night, by a team from Port Services using a specialist crane that can lift up to 1,000 tonnes. I had reliable information that the lift would be happening that night, but still you never know exactly how fast these heavy-lift operations will go so I turned up at midnight, found the best angle, and waited with my flask of soup

It was around 3am when the lift began:

After the loco was raised by about 20-feet there was a lot of banging noises from near the crane so the loco was lowered again while adjustments were made. Then the lift began for real. The next photo was used by the BBC as their "Big Picture" for today. Nice to see a wide shot being used, as it tends to be mostly tight shots that are used nowadays. I think a wide shot can often tell the story better.

And the next photo was used on the STV News web site.

The photos have all been sent to the national newspapers too so hopefully some will be used tomorrow. I'm fairly sure this next one won't be used, but I like it because of the composition with the guys sitting on the vehicle at the right of the frame.

Close-up of the loco being loaded on to a transporter which will take it by road to wherever it's going:

As preparation for the night shoot I had gone along to the site on Saturday afternoon. There was nobody around so I took the opportunity to go down to where the loco had come to rest. Naturally I called my better half to let her know what I was doing, so if she didn't hear from me in 10 minutes then something was wrong. You should always do that if you're going alone in to any situation where there's an element of risk. (Or just don't put yourself in that situation.)

I also made a panorama of the whole site. It was a 60-megapixel composite of 35 photos, showing a full 180-degrees, although it looked a little silly having the road at both sides of the picture so I cropped it to this middle section.

Click here to see a larger version

This is how the full 180-degree view looked:

And for novelty value, here's a 53-megapixel panorama made from 24 photos showing the scene where the locomotive has been stranded for nearly six weeks.

Click here to see a larger version

There have been two quirky stories about Tesco in the news recently, one about them banning shoppers from wearing pyjamas and another about a 24-year-old woman being asked for ID because she wanted to buy a slice of quiche.

We had our own run-in with a strange Tesco policy the other night. My girlfriend Katie wanted to buy some non-alcoholic cider, but the self-service checkout refused the sale because it was apparently classed as an alcoholic drink which can't be sold after 10pm:

Now you might think this is a simple computer error. After all the product does clearly state ALCOHOL-FREE right there in big writing on the front label.

But no! The manager of the store got involved and told us that the product is correctly classed as an alcoholic drink because, according to the (very) small print on the back of the label, it can contain up to 0.05% alcohol. If he authorised the sale, he said, he would lose his job and be hit with a £5,000 fine.

What's really bizarre, though, is that I was able to go and pick up a can of Shandy Bass, which contains TEN TIMES as much alcohol (0.5%) and the self-service checkout was quite happy for me to pay my 49p and leave with the product:

My second project for learning 3DS Max was to design a fairly simple object with non-standard, non-symmetrical geometry, and build it exactly how I envisaged it, ie: working out how to create a specific structure in 3D, not just pulling a shape in random directions until I eventually found something that was nearly right. I'm going to want to do this commercially one day, and sooner rather than later, so I need to be able to work to a designer's exact specifications.

I decided to create a perfume bottle, as this would involve a few other challenges to keep things interesting, such as making a semi-opaque glass material, and putting a logo on the bottle. And I made it a bit harder for myself by displaying the perfume bottle on a satin sheet, draped over a block, which involved learning about 'cloth' materials in Max. So quite a tricky project for a beginner, but I'd say the result is fairly good. Click to enlarge:

Here's how the scene looked in Max:

Note that the logo isn't simply 'typed' in to the scene. It had to be created separately as a texture and added to a plane, which was then meticulously manipulated to fit the shape of the bottle. There may be an easier way to achieve the same effect, but here's what I did:

The litte ridges at the bottom of the bottle were produced using a displacement map. But if I had applied that map to the whole of the glass material then it would have created weird ridges all over the top and bottom of the bottle, so I only added it to a 'ring' of faces around the bottom of the bottle. That introduced a new challenge: Manually editing the texture co-ordinates (UVs) for those faces. That was a lot easier than I expected.

Designing the satin sheet was fun as Max includes material simulation, so I only needed to create the flat sheet and then tell Max to drape it over the box. I'm not 100% happy with the satin material I created as it looks a little too much like plastic to me, but the intricacies of material design aren't the priority at this stage.

I've always been interested in 3D visualisation, and I've dabbled with several design packages over the years, but it's only recently that I've committed some serious time to learning the skills needed in this fascinating area of creativity.

Over the last few weeks I've started to get competent with basic geometry creation and manipulation in 3DS Max, and I'm even scratching the surface of material creation which turns out to be a lot harder than I expected.

I'd say it's about time that I unleashed my first render for the world to see. This is the result of a self-assigned challenge to produce a vaguely realistic diamond and light it appropriately. I took it a step further and rendered a scene with several diamonds, some basic coloured objects, all on a reflective surface with bump and displacement maps. The render was produced in mental ray.

Click to view a larger version:

Here's how the raw scene looked in 3DS:

The goal of this project was primarily to learn about creating the different materials and then light the scene using traditional photographic lighting. The scene has three key lights, all behind the objects, including two hard spotlights at either side. This was because glassy materials look better with light coming through them, rather than bouncing off them. There's one fill light in front of the objects.

Here's exactly the same scene, but with more dramatic lighting, simply by bringing the main backlight down to just above the objects. (And no lens flare! Yay!)

Same scene with the original lighting, but with the coloured shapes replaced by wooden blocks and a less-than-perfect chrome ball:

Next I want to produce something with more complicated geometry.

I mentioned before (here) that I'd written a piece about the computer game Field of Glory for the Press & Journal and the Daily Mail newspapers. The much longer and more in-depth piece I wrote for PC Format magazine is in this month's issue:

I had a rare couple of days away from news photography at the weekend when I did the event photography for the Aviemore Sled Dog Rally, which was run on snow for the first time in 15 years. I photographed most of Saturday and Sunday so there should be photos of most of the people and dogs who took part, although I didn't do the early morning stages as it was too dark.

After two late nights and most of today, I finally have 824 photos uploaded to a gallery, from where people can order prints in pretty much any format they can imagine, from small glossies to large canvases, t-shirts, mouse mats, cushions, and everything in between.

A small amount of every sale will be donated to the Husky Club. £1.25 for small prints and £1.75 for everything else. That probably won't make much of a dent in the club's running costs, but every little helps as they say!

Click here to view the gallery on Photobox

One of those rare times when I post a non-work picture just because I like it. Shot this frame today while doing event photography at the Aviemore sled dog rally.