I went to the F1 the other week in Shanghai, it was an exciting affair but it’s all very much 2 weeks ago now so it’s a bit late to write about it. Anyway, needless to say, my mum and her fella really got into the spirit of things and a fun time was had by all

The place was flooded with cameras, most notably large SLRs with extremely long white lenses. My friend was one of them, let’s call him “John” for the sake of argument.  He stood at the railings taking photos and then noticed another guy about 20 feet away with a similar setup taking photos and occasionally looking across. “John” responded, taking pics and then looking across as the other guy did the same, “Hey, what lens do you reckon that guy’s using, 200? 400?” he said, and “I think it’s a prime, it’s a prime”, subconsciously he reached down and extended his zoom lens to the maximum while the other guy was looking away. As I looked around you could see a similar pattern around the stadium, guys with unfeasibly large cameras never closer than 20 feet to the next guy, all taking photos and keeping a surreptitious eye on the guys close to them. It was as if they were all taking part in some kind of mass mating ritual, parading their plumage and watching over their territory. Poor old Woai arrived rather late in the day with a rather meagre looking lens. He looked around at the competition, took a few photos while “John” was away and then scuttled away to carve out his own territory away from the big boys.

After 2 weeks of processing, “John” uploaded some pics to flickr, sure enough as I look at the set again there are almost as many pics of guys with cameras as there are cars.