This is a shot of our friend Neil who has been staying with us in Bulgaria for the last couple of weeks ( you may remember him from this shot) . Libby and I first met him in 2005, when he was working as the Creative Industries Development Officer for Creative Lancashire. Since then, in addition to being a good friend, he's also been a source of inspiration and encouragement, a sounding board, a critical eye, a mediator, and a general all-round good guy.

Anyway, we finally managed to convince him to come out and visit us, and during the last few weeks he's been helping us work out where we want to go with our business, and what we should do to get from here to there. It's been a tiring process, but we've made some great progress (which I'll tell you about soon) and we'll be sorry to see him go when he heads back to the UK on Tuesday.

It hasn't all been hard work though – we've managed to find time for a beer or three – and we took the day off today and headed up to the Buzludzha monument with Libby and the kids. We had a good look round the building, a great picnic, and I think I probably got a few shots that I'll be blogging over the next day or so.

I also got this shot.

As we were leaving we passed the two torches you can see behind Neil's head and he asked if we could stop and take a few photographs, including one that would make him look like a communist hero. This shot is the result, and as Neil tells me that this is his favourite portrait of him "ever", I consider it a definite success.

Oh, and for those of you who can't read the Cyrillic alphabet, the title is a reference to this guy ;-)

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

4.22pm on 15/5/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 55mm f/5.6 1/800 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none minor(ish)