Only happy when it rains

32 Miles to Breakfast

2012-02-12T19:18:00.001Z

The 32 Miles to Breakfast guys have just been signed to Bravesoul Records, so were looking for some new photos (particularly as they've recently acquired an additional member). Despite a sudden attack of heavy rain (after days of cold-but-sunny) we headed out first to Ashton Lane

Then went down to the abandoned Bandstand and arena in Kelvingrove Park, where the combination of moss-covered red-blaes gives the ground a particularly weird texture - like snow that's frozen into a crust. Only green and fuzzy…

we did try a few "floating" shots in the style of Cole Rise, but they turned out to be every bit as difficult as you might expect - particularly with 5 people - and William's hair kept giving the game away.

James (drums)

William (guitar)

Dennis (keyboards)

Alex (vocals and guitar)

Mike (bass).

Foggy

2012-02-07T23:01:00.002Z

Another shot from the fog last night. The "beam" effect is better from the road, but I drew the line at standing in it to take long-exposure photos...

Supernova

2012-02-06T22:55:00.000Z

Thirteen Lost and Found + Tattie Toes

2012-01-29T21:36:00.002Z

Following the Session A9 gig the Threads of Sound folk were back at Stereo to record the launch of RM Hubbert's new album "Thirteen Lost and Found". Luckily this did not involve any kneeling.

First up were support "Tattie Toes" who played an exotic mix of songs (in Spanish and Basque and other languages), fiddle, bells, bass, and a huge variety of unusual percussion.

A change of lighting, and it was on to a one-off live playthrough of Thirteen Lost and Found, including the collaborators on each track.

Mary Kenny

Hanne Tuulikki

Alasdair Roberts (doing a version of one of my favourite - extremely gloomy and strange - songs, "The False Bride")

RM Hubbert himself

Emma Pollock

Alex Kapranos

Aidan Moffat

Again, more pics over on Flickr.

Session A9

2012-01-29T21:28:00.000Z

This was a wildly busy week on the gigs front as Threads had lined up recordings of two shows. First up was Session A9 at the Concert Hall, as part of Celtic Connections. I'd heard them a few years ago at the Old Fruitmarket and they were just as impressive this time, however the gig was uncommonly hard on the knees as we could only shoot the first three songs from the centre and had to crounch down so as not to block the audience's view. This would probably have been less problematic if I hadn't a) tripped and cut my knee the previous day, and b) worn knee-high boots (because of the snow) which made it hard to bend my ankles and caused me to emit squeaking noises every time I moved...

More photos over on Flickr.

Quicksilver

2012-01-24T21:53:00.003Z

Galaxies

2012-01-19T23:13:00.000Z

Cage of Light

2012-01-15T19:11:00.001Z

Ran out of stuff to read and got a bit carried away with the spiral staircase and Hipstamatic...

Strandbeest #2

2012-01-08T23:52:00.000Z

Sprocket Rocket

2012-01-08T18:48:00.000Z

Having spent the weekend wrestling with scanners I've finally managed to scan in some Sprocket Rocket shots - after going to the extreme lengths of reading the scanner instructions. They're still not that great as the scanner doesn't want to scan the sprocket holes, so I can either have full length scans without them, or stuck-together ones with them (where I persuaded the scanner they were actually slides. However, experimentation will continue and considering I was using a roll of 7-years-out-of-date film that should really have been twice as fast as it was (400 ISO not 200 ISO) they're not bad at all...

The Lion and Unicorn Staircase (with sprockets)

Unicorn with sprockets (from two shots stuck together)

Full-length unicorn without sprockets

Not a small nuclear explosion, but the Christmas lights in George Square (admittedly almost as damaging to the eyes). The join didn't work quite so well here...

Heather, Adrian, TJ, Clare, and me in the mirror (this really didn't survive the underexposure, even with the flash-gun).

City Wings

2012-01-05T20:33:00.003Z

No photoshop involved in this one, spotted today while finishing the spool on the Sprocket Rocket (I think I remembered to take the lens cap off at least some of the time...)

Strandbeest

2012-01-03T18:10:00.000Z

Rezillos at the ABC

2011-12-28T15:13:00.001Z

Last Thursday the Threads folk were at the ABC filming and photographing The Rezillos playing in front of a huge LED video wall (everyone was worried this would create difficulties, but both Paul and Michael (our film guys) and I loved it - usually we're vying for every available photon). I wasn't particularly familiar with the band before the gig but, as usual with Threads bands, really enjoyed the show.

Faye Fife and Jim Brady

Chris Agnew and Eugene Reynolds

And the giant mirrorball photographed from the upstairs bar:

Athena

2011-12-19T21:22:00.001Z

Morag's underwater explorations continue...

A very Potato Christmas 2011

2011-12-18T21:01:00.001Z

This year's traditional Potatoes of Night Christmas photo was made slightly more difficult by pikipimp.com being down, but we managed nevertheless - particularly as Julie had foreseen this difficulty and provided me with some antlers/antennae in-camera...

Bank of England

2011-12-11T21:10:00.002Z

I'm forever blowing bubbles

2011-12-06T20:25:00.000Z

My usual lunch date at Di Maggio's with the Mhitheag collective was combined with an emergency photo-shot for the December picture in their Christmas calendar. As luck would have it I'd just given Morag a loan of my flash-gun, so we had to rely on on-camera flash with a hanky over it (to lessen glare a bit). However, I managed to get some shots (thanks largely to Alison and some cunningly deployed bubble mixture).

Matthew and the bubbles

Andrew does something complicated with straws while Matthew receives messages from the Heavens (or possibly spots some more bubbles just out of shot).

I dreamed your dress was made of mirrors

2011-12-05T23:05:00.002Z

Morag in my sparkly dress for the "underwater" part of Saturday's shoot at Dreghorn Studios. The real submerged photos will hopefully appear soon, but we both quite liked the way it reflected the light onto the walls like a mirrorball. It also sounds like rain falling on a roof when you pick it up. (Title borrowed from Zoey Van Goey).

Adam Stafford

2011-12-01T20:34:00.001Z

Video of one of Adam Stafford's cunningly bizarre loop pedal songs as previously mentioned - think KT Tunstall, but more exotic...

The Windmills of Your Mind

2011-11-29T22:09:00.002Z

The more you look at photos of wind farms the more strange they seem

looking like giant, tethered seagulls

or angular stick-creatures

standing around in a kind of Dali-esque fashion

on the edge of a illusory body of water.

Reaping the Whirlwind

2011-11-27T16:18:00.000Z

Taken at Whitelee Wind Farm - officially The Coldest Place on Earth...

Professors' Squirrel

2011-11-20T21:54:00.000Z

Under Sea, Over Stone

2011-11-06T22:38:00.003Z

(Title garbled from Susan Cooper).

Pumajaw

2011-10-27T20:23:00.009+01:00

The final Threads of Sound of this month featured Organs of Love, Louise McVey and the Cracks in the Concrete, and Pumajaw.

More pics over here. The videos of several of the recent bands are now up here, including this one of the excellent Pony Boy, shot by Paul Fegan, so you can see what you've been missing if you've not been Threading...

Minx

2011-10-22T15:59:00.000+01:00

Cloudburn

2011-10-16T23:06:00.000+01:00

The Obsidian Isle

2011-10-16T23:05:00.000+01:00

I was at Street Level on Saturday to hear a talk by Gayle Chong-Kwan about her new exhibition "The Obsidian Isle", a collection of photographs of vanished places. Apparently they're medium format photos (taken on a film-stock that has now been discontinued) of scenes built up from models and old photographs of the places. They're extremely creepy and lovely - more information on the process of creating them, and a gallery of the photos can be seen here.

Lightbulb Moments

2011-10-15T20:55:00.000+01:00

This field of lightbulbs had sprung up outside the library earlier this week - unfortunately they weren't lit when I was going past, and they'd vanished by the next day (it seemed to have something to do with a JP Morgan recruitment drive).

Martin John Henry, 17th c. and Adam Stafford

2011-10-13T21:09:00.003+01:00

Back at Stereo this weekend for the latest gig in a Threads-packed month. First on was Adam Stafford, who had one of those cunning looping devices - in the manner of KT Tunstall - but produced much less standard sounding music with it. Many of the pieces had complex layers of vocal harmony, not often involving words, but with an amazing range - right up to unearthly shrieks and siren noises in a couple. Each "layer" had an associated range of dance-moves or gestures (not in a really choreographed way, just that it seemed to go with the sounds) so it was like watching a man in the grip of an incredibly well-organised musical multiple-personality disorder. It's hard to describe - so you should definitely go and see him if you get the chance.

Next were The Seventeenth Century, featuring fiddle and cornet in among the usual guitars and drums, with an unusual and excellent kind of folk-rock thing going on.

And finally Martin John Henry - who was launching his new album. As usual, more photos over on the Threads Flickr.

Live Re-mix

2011-10-08T18:02:00.001+01:00

The Threads folk were back at Stereo last weekend recording/photographing/filming a gig featuring Kid Canaveral then Zoey Van Goey doing a live remix of their songs with GNGR.

Kid Canaveral were on first (with the stage looking much flasher than usual thanks to artwork by Katy Wilson)

There were also fairylights strung from the roof in the style of the Old Fruitmarket.

Next up were Zoey Van Goey, who started off playing some songs in their usual style, only to be joined half way through

by GNGR who did some live remixing while they played/sang. I wasn't sure if I was going to like this much, as I'm not usually very into electronic stuff, but it was really good. I particularly liked the new version of the "imaginary 8-track" section in "Sackville Sun", which even featured some carefully choreographed "dancing" from the band :-)

More photos over on the Threads Of Sound flickr page.

Carried Away By

2011-09-26T20:23:00.000+01:00

Here's my shot from yesterday's levitation workshop in Edinburgh with Miss Aniela (also the model in this photo) which was excellent. I think my Photoshopping and levitation skills still need some work, but I certainly learnt numerous incantations and got lots of new ideas ;-)

Watermark

2011-09-24T19:50:00.001+01:00

I wasn't really happy with the previous version of this picture (which probably makes more sense in conjunction with its accompanying poem, hopefully coming sometime soon to a pamphlet near you...) Anyway, the librarian really needed longer hair so that it could hang in "rats' tails" on her neck, so I hired my model friend Heather (who is actually a librarian in reality) who, as you can see did a great job at looking worriedly waterlogged in her spellbound library (played here by the Level 9 Annexe at the Uni Library).

Govanhill Baths

2011-09-22T22:55:00.001+01:00

I met up with Morag and Colin at the Govanhill Baths on Saturday for Doors Open Day. We'd kind of assumed they'd just let you in to wander around taking photos and things, but you actually had to join a guided tour which made life a bit harder (though presumably lessened the chance of people falling into empty swimming pools and breaking their legs).

It was interesting nonetheless though, with lots of wildlife creeping through doors...

And around changing rooms.

The Escher-esque sides of the main pool. We did ask if they might arrange to let photographers in to wander around a bit more freely (like they occasionally do at the empty Lansdowne Church on Great Western Road) and they seemed to think that might well be a possibility. So there may be more photos (from less peculiar angles) at a later date...

Puddles

2011-09-18T21:01:00.001+01:00

On Friday I had remembered neither to pick up my umbrella, nor to Scotchguard my new shoes (again) and it rained all the way back to the car, which did at least provide lots of puddle photo opportunities...

Icarus Wind

2011-09-18T20:31:00.001+01:00

I'm currently working my way through Thea Gilmore's back catalogue, having downloaded the album this song is on (it's actually "Liejacker" and not "Avalanche" as the video suggests) after hearing Razor Valentine last week. I really like the whole album, although "Icarus Wind" is definitely my favourite track (it also features a cover of "You Spin Me Right Round" which is vastly more creepy when you can actually make out what the lyrics are...)

Underwater TTV

2011-09-12T20:37:00.002+01:00

I'd really like to try some underwater photography, but the cost of the equipment is a bit prohibitive at the moment. However, Photojojo had instructions for making an underwater TTV with an old TLR camera (which is essentially just a box with some lenses and so doesn't have much that can be upset by water) and a Pringles tube (or similar). So I rushed out to buy some crisps and duct tape, filled the bath, then realised I didn't actually have anything very interesting to photograph. So here is

a polka-dot duck

the TLR being waterlogged (I quite like this one)

an amethyst (not very clear). This one was actually completely underwater, which seems to have upset the focus. I think my technique needs some work...

Secret Gardens

2011-09-08T20:16:00.001+01:00

Spellbound

2011-09-04T21:50:00.003+01:00

Managed to get into the Library's Special Collection...

Lights

2011-08-31T20:36:00.000+01:00

Morag and I went along to a studio thing at the weekend, which frankly turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. However, I liked this shot of the model, Lauren, who was doing a great job in the face of general adversity.

Buchanan St. Blues

2011-08-30T20:30:00.001+01:00

appropriately situated advert...

Walking on Broken Glass

2011-08-28T21:08:00.002+01:00

Spindrift at Michaelmas

2011-08-22T20:04:00.001+01:00

Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition 2011

2011-08-20T21:14:00.000+01:00

I was back through in Edinburgh last week for this year's Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition prizegiving ceremony at the Book Festival, where the ceremony started and finished with clips from a film Donny O'Rourke had made of Edwin Morgan some years ago.

David Kinloch introducing the proceedings.

Kona Macphee talking about the judging process.

Jane McKie, who won first prize.

Jane Yeh, who won second prize.

Vicki Feaver, also judging this year

Gill Andrews, runner up

Helen Mort, whose poem had been commmended.

(You can read all the winning and commended poems over on the competition website.)

Rain Tower

2011-08-20T21:04:00.000+01:00

Slow Shutter

2011-08-14T14:10:00.003+01:00

Trying out the "SlowShutter" app - I've not quite got the hang of it, but I liked the white car zooming into the bottom corner and the circles of rain on the window. I'd just been to the CCA to an event organised by Polly Clark as part of Cove Park's summer residency programme: a reading by Anne Carson and Robin Robertson.

I'm a big fan of Robertson's poetry and had heard him read before, but didn't know much about Anne Carson, although I had managed to get hold of a copy of "If not, winter: Fragments of Sappho" which has translations of Sappho's poems, but kept in the fragmentary form they were found in on scraps of papyrus. Anyway, I really enjoyed hearing her read a variety of pieces (she has a very droll style of delivery). One in particular featured "The Library of Water" in Iceland, with Polly reading some lines and Carson's husband walking round the room doing a kind of large scale cat's cradle with a reel of pink string. I'll be hitting the University Library in search of some more of her books...

Threads of Sound - The Last Machete

2011-08-11T23:19:00.001+01:00

A few shots from the Threads gig last Saturday, featuring

Muscles of Joy

North American War

and F.O. Machete.

More pics on the Threads Flickr page.

Green Vinyl

2011-08-07T19:35:00.003+01:00

Last night's Thread's Gig (photos to follow) was the last gig for F.O. Machete and the launch of their E.P. "My Last Machete".

This is the biggest cover photo I've had so far...

...and it contains an actual see-through green record. Here's my favourite song (along with "Teenage Spaceship") filmed as it was recorded...

Dinosaur on Wheels

2011-08-02T20:34:00.004+01:00

Spotted it trying to sneak in the back door of the library...

EMP

2011-07-31T19:36:00.004+01:00

Higher and Higher

2011-07-31T19:19:00.001+01:00

Stuart

2011-07-26T19:56:00.001+01:00

Caught up with Stuart who was back in the country for a couple of weeks and wanted some new profile shots for LinkedIn and suchlike. Unfortunately we were stuck on dry land as the pond in the park here doesn't have any sailing boats (and is currently doing its best impression of the Sargasso Sea anyway).

Puddled

2011-07-20T18:35:00.003+01:00

Mirror Brick

2011-07-20T18:34:00.002+01:00

Re-threaded

2011-07-20T16:35:00.001+01:00

Some photos from the first in the new series of Threads of Sound gigs at Stereo the other night, featuring:

Pony Boy

Lenzie Moss

and Autistic Angus.

More photos are over here.

Love on the Walls

2011-07-16T20:42:00.002+01:00

Clydebuilt in The Herald

2011-07-14T15:47:00.005+01:00

view full image

Last year Jim Carruth arranged for all the Mirrorball 'Clydebuilt' mentees to get free passes to the Glasgow Jazz Festival with the aim of producing a collection of jazz-poems.

After going to lots of gigs and most of us being converted to jazz fans of one shape or another in the process, the book duly appeared and was launched at a very entertaining (and short, as my father pointed out approvingly) event at the City Halls where all the poets read. (It must be said that the book was brought into existence largely by sheer force-of-will on the part of Jim in the face of all sorts of funding cutbacks).

Anyway, apparently one of my poems from the anthology is The Herald's "Poem of the Day", which has cheered me up greatly in the face of a looming dental checkup. It's based on a performance by the excellent Arun Ghosh Sextet, who can be seen here (albeit slightly depleted in numbers):

Ruby Rose

2011-07-12T11:55:00.001+01:00

Magic Circle

2011-07-10T18:19:00.003+01:00

Levitation is a tricky business - I burned my thumb and hurt my back. Maybe I should have practiced levitating pencils for a bit first...

Into the light

2011-07-06T18:43:00.003+01:00

Starflex

2011-07-04T20:04:00.002+01:00

Bowsprit

2011-07-04T17:11:00.006+01:00

Sharp Shooting

2011-07-03T22:01:00.003+01:00

Most of last weekend was spent photographing a machete for the cover of F.O. Machete's last ever E.P. "My Last Machete". It's a recording of the gig at King Tut's last November and includes songs about credit cards, pandas, and a lovely cover of "Teenage Spaceship" (complete with spaceship noises). You can buy a copy over at iTunes here, although it'll also be available as a 12" vinyl, hence the picture for the back:

Ghost Town

2011-07-03T19:36:00.005+01:00

Yellow

2011-07-03T19:36:00.001+01:00

School's Out

2011-07-03T15:45:00.000+01:00

Cat dreams

2011-06-28T16:12:00.002+01:00

Sky Hatch

2011-06-27T21:18:00.000+01:00

Chimneys

2011-06-27T21:17:00.000+01:00

Amy and Bob's Wedding

2011-06-20T14:29:00.008+01:00

The latest Chapel Choir wedding was that of Amy and Bob - held in a secret, subterranean location in Edinburgh...

(well, not that secret - it was The Caves).

Amy and Bob during the ceremony

Sheena with Ruth

Cutting the cake

Stephen, Eilidh and Katie...

...who had retreated, along with me, to a room full of the heads of stone cows where we discussed traditional wedding topics like chips, snakes, cars and spiders and were joined after a bit by the rest of the choir (who brought some of the tiny wedding-cakes, which were lovely - with flowers and lemon icing)

Hilde

Iain and Chris with the controversial buttonhole that matched Amy's outfit

Daymark

2011-06-17T01:09:00.002+01:00

Botanic Lighthouse #2

2011-06-17T01:07:00.001+01:00

The Botanic Lighthouse

2011-06-15T22:49:00.000+01:00

Karine Polwart

2011-06-12T18:04:00.003+01:00

Some of the photos from the Karine Polwart gig at Oran Mor on Friday. Only just made it as it turns out that folk musicians start only 1 hour after the billed time, not 2 hours like the average rock band...

The rest of the photos are over here, along with the rest of the k.d. lang pics here.

k.d. lang

2011-06-07T02:25:00.007+01:00

One of the photos from tonight's k.d. lang gig at the Armadillo. This was the biggest gig I've done so far and they were much stricter about the whole "3 songs and you're out" bit - in that you were actually out of the hall at that point rather than just merging with the rest of the non-photo-taking audience. My kit was relentlessly mocked as the other photographers had much bigger lenses than I had - indeed one had a lens that was just about bigger than me, but despite all this it was a very entertaining experience.

More shots of k.d. and her amazing, glowing shirt-tails coming soon at More Than The Music.

Hard Light

2011-06-03T17:27:00.004+01:00

The recent bad weather has really taken its toll at the Uni...

Himalayan Blue

2011-06-03T01:29:00.000+01:00

Mirrorball Demolition Party

2011-05-16T21:18:00.008+01:00

The Poetry Club at Glasgow School of Art is about to be demolished, leaving St. Mungo's Mirrorball temporarily homeless. Undaunted by this, they held a farewell Demolition Party...

Sandy Hutchison toasting our Illustrious Leader, Jim Carruth (he appeared only slightly singed afterwards)

Christie Williamson

Dai Vaughan making a strange face

Donny O'Rourke channeling Noel Coward

Guy with cool hat (and shades)

Maggi Rabatski

Assembled poets...

Unrelated shot of the trees with wee lights on Sauchiehall Street...

The baths of all the western stars..

2011-05-14T21:28:00.008+01:00

It probably wasn't actually what Tennyson had in mind, but the mural behind the Western Baths in Hillhead is pretty cool - and remarkably only has a couple of wee bits of graffiti on it. There's even a ship in which "to sail beyond the sunset":

And in reflection...

Throught the Pinhole #2

2011-05-07T15:33:00.005+01:00

The University from the Library on a sunny day

Took me a while to work out what this is, but by checking through the contact sheet for the order I took things in I finally realised that this is when I slid the camera down a slide in the park. It spun round halfway through the exposure which is why the "reflections" don't actually match up with the things they seem to be reflecting.

Cherry trees in the park. What seems to be a giant slab of rock in the foreground is actually the bench the camera was sitting on.

Hope Street from a traffic light pedestrian button thingy

Trees and not very clear bluebells in Pollock Park

Me staring down mysteriously at the camera through some leaves

Andrew standing very still for 4 seconds in the back garden. With artistic bins.

Cherry blossom too close

Cherry blossom in the grass.

Weird creature in the garden

2011-05-05T17:52:00.005+01:00

It was Andrew's 3rd birthday recently so I headed over to join the party, which included

people offering you hippos at the door...

a cake in the shape of a train

with candles

and a pop-up tent in the garden

into which everyone tried to fit at some point

although there wasn't much room and inhabitants were relentlessly attacked by parties of tent-raiders and their cats.

Everyone had a good time running about with beakers...

...or trying to put the tent down (which necessitated a fold through the 11th dimension).

Assembled party-goers with escaping Matthew...

those beakers won't carry themselves, you know...

Light Works

2011-05-03T00:20:00.002+01:00

Blue Notes

2011-05-02T22:44:00.001+01:00

Experiments in Sinking

2011-04-24T20:02:00.006+01:00

Still trying to achieve the effect in the "Big Wheel" photo below, which is hard without a portable bus shelter... Will find a more interesting subject to submerge once I've perfected the technique a bit...

World Pinhole Day

2011-04-24T19:35:00.005+01:00

Today is World Pinhole Day, and handily enough I had converted my now spectacularly out of date 50D to a pinhole camera by drilling a hole in the body cap and sticking one of my Coke-can pinhole lenses to the inside. Here are a couple of shots:

It does work perfectly well, but kind of takes the fun out of it, and the photos seem to lack the dreamlike feel of the "real" pinhole pics. Also, you lose a lot of the wide-angle effect because of the digital crop factor. So I'll probably stick to my trusty "Like-A", currently encased in a "Pinox" shell:

(It was actually meant to be a "Pinox - Slide", but my tendency to "cut twice and measure once" kind of got in the way of the sliding mechanism working, so it's more of a "Pinox - Swing"... )

Underwater/Overwater

2011-04-15T01:23:00.006+01:00

I was chatting to Morag yesterday about underwater photos, including one she'd seen at the Edinburgh Science Festival that featured a shot of a shark underwater and a nearby island above the water. Anyway, this reminded me of a series of photos by Neil Craver featured in JPG a couple of months ago, particularly the one here. There are more otherworldly under/overwater shots from the series on his blog.

Edit: Morag has tracked down the actual shark photo in question which is by Alexander Mustard and is the second photo in this gallery (it's a basking shark - they're terribly cute).

Through the Pinhole

2011-04-13T22:38:00.006+01:00

These are the first shots out of my newly constructed (and now mostly deconstructed - I overdid the electrical tape which made opening it a bit difficult) pinhole camera. Despite the man in Snappy Snaps being very disparaging of the likelihood of getting anything off the film, I think they have a certain, shoogly, overexposed charm...

Kibble palace.

Giant toffee and hedge. The ragged black border is the edge of the "window" cut in the inside of the camera that masks the film.

Light squiggles on the pond.

Daffodils

Cresswell Lane

Cat on a Warm Slate Roof

2011-04-11T16:55:00.002+01:00

I always wanted a room with a roof you could climb out onto, but the cat has beaten me to it with her extra-sticky paws and ability to squeeze out of the bathroom window...

Aria Alba

2011-04-04T16:18:00.006+01:00

I was through in Edinburgh on Saturday photographing the dress rehearsal for Aria Alba's upcoming show.

Singing "Such A Parcel of Rogues in a Nation" near the end of the set (Blogspot always puts them photos back to front from the order you upload them for some reason and I am feeling too lazy to fix it).

A Finnish piece, sung by an actual Finnish singer (I did manage to recognise the occasional word from Cathures' recent adventures in singing Finnish, but unfortunately I still have no idea what any of them mean :-( ).

"Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend"

Impromptu rendition of "All That Jazz" in the absence of the person who was going to be singing it in the concert.

Nell Drew, the Vocal Director

Rossini's "Cat Duet", which was very funny...

as was "Three Little Maids from School" from "The Mikado". More photos over on Flickr.

Patrick Wolf

2011-03-25T11:52:00.004Z

I was photographing the Patrick Wolf gig at Oran Mor the other night for More Than The Music. I'd signed up for the gig mainly because he - and the support as it turned out - ticked all my boxes for the most fun sort of musician to photograph, i.e. wears sparkly outfits, makes dramatic gestures, and leaps about the stage. This was certainly the case, but the performance was fantastic - I'd definitely recommend going to see him if you get the chance.

Support act Rowdy Superstar, who was very entertaining and disguised as a disco ball.

Patrick Wolf and harp...

...and violin
...back to just singing.

Derelict

2011-03-22T23:58:00.001Z

Chapter and Verse

2011-03-22T23:56:00.002Z

Reclining

2011-03-22T23:37:00.004Z

I realised there hadn't been a cat-pic for a while, so for all you Freya fans out there, here she is reclining in her customary manner...

Origami Daffodil

2011-03-20T17:14:00.001Z

Happy Birthday

2011-03-14T02:07:00.002Z

It was Matthew's first birthday party yesterday - an occasion which involved lots of enthusiastic walking-with-carts...

While Andrew pondered the problems of insect infestation of clothing...

Breast Cancer Care

2011-03-10T16:08:00.002Z

I was taking photos at the Breast Cancer Care networking event in the Blythswood Hotel last night, trying to be unobtrusive and snap people chatting to each other about the charity's work and fundraising ideas.

Heather Suttie, who was hosting the event, holding one of the mysteriously numbered cards that had been handed out to everyone (9,650 is the number of people in the Glasgow area being treated for breast cancer).

Heather with Lorraine Dallas of Breast Cancer Care and Lorraine Queen of Scottish Slimmers who were all speaking at the event.

Heather and the team of staff and volunteers at the end of a successful evening.

RM Hubbert @The Arches

2011-03-02T16:03:00.006Z

Photos from the RM Hubbert gig at the Arches are now up here, plus Hubby provides interesting answers to a bunch of strange questions I threw at him over here.

Stairway Spectrum

2011-02-24T02:45:00.002Z

Drumpellier

2011-02-16T19:53:00.008Z

This rainbow was absolutely fantastic all the way along the dual carriageway and the second I found somewhere I could stop and park it started vanishing...

I was headed out to Drumpellier Park with Julie to take some photos for her campaign, which I did, but also got very distracted by a variety of less documentary subjects...

Julie and Peter, a fellow campaigner, walking past a puddle

Scary doll's head. For some reason Peter thought it was odd when I went back to take some extra shots of it...

More Than the Music

2011-02-13T21:24:00.001Z

The Zoey Van Goey photos are now up.

Headshots - Part 3

2011-02-12T18:59:00.005Z

The third and final part of the random headshots project features poet Donny O'Rourke, who was the illustrious leader of the DACE poetry course I did for a couple of years and thoroughly enjoyed.

Donny's flat is wildly interesting as it's full of extra-round bay windows, paintings and books...

...the only drawback of this being the scarcity of blank walls. However, we did manage to find one...

...then headed out into the close where I became slightly obsessed with the stained glass window and the light coming through it...

...finally going for a couple of hat shots...

...(Leonard be damned)...

More shots over here.