Yesterday I helped out at a charity event by photographing it for the organisers. Briefly, this was a charity swim held up in a lake halfway up Snowdon mountain, in the Snowdonia National Park, and I was involved because a friend in a Sub-aqua Club was helping out with safety boat, stand-by divers and so on, and he asked me to help by photographing it. Most shots were taken on a borrowed Nikon dSLR (and I don't have the files as yet) but I also took a Leica M8 and here are some pix from it. On the day conditions were much colder than anticipated - the water had an inch of ice over much of it and even that which was clear had to have 3m of ice broken away from the shore - water temp was somewhere between 2 and 4 degrees apparently. For the full story you can visit http://www.cappeu.com/bch-swim.htm but suffice it to say that it was bitterly cold with a biting wind at times. It was a stunning but cold day, an after even a few minutes in the water, Alex, the swimmer, who was raising funds for the Birmingham Children's Hospital which had given his daughter a life saving operation, was clearly very cold indeed - he was wearing core body temperature sensors and a doctor monitored them - and despite preparation the temperature was clearly colder than anticipated. I'm not sure that I could do such a swim!
