Smart phones, are quite smart. Not as smart as we’d like to think. Phone calls seem to be harder and harder to achieve they are completely useless in bad weather, the batteries don’t last that long and if you don’t turn the bloody thing off, it constantly harrangs you into be some sort of cyber socialite. All this negativity however is not what I’m about, It’s fair to say that the smart phone has revolutionised photography as much polaroid did back in the sixties and seventies. Facebook and twitter are just choc-a-bloc with instagram photos of drunk folk and let’s be honest they are far better than the previous incarnation of party photos, where most people did just look ugly and drunk. Where as now, swamped in effects and digital tom foolery people look slightly more palatable. Some folk take a more creative approach to using their camera phone and in some cases the results are pretty nice. This is good if slightly irritating.

A photo is not about the equipment used to capture it or the amount of processing required to achieve the finished image. It is all about the picture is it not?

These pictures I’ve put up were taken on a 5mp HTC. The photos without filtering are flat lifeless and of poor quality however using a nice we app called vignette you can get a pretty decent result out of it. I quite like these, it took me a long time to come to terms with that but I actually do. Polaroids always had a sort of lo-fi vibe about them that was there main appeal and still is. Phones mark a second revolution in popular photography like it or not. You may not like these pictures, you might think they are just more populist un-fettered, poorly refined crap and in all reality I still have a bind in my mind about them, they are a bit shit but that is exactly what’s good about them. The fact is these little devices have generated a massive interest in imagery that simply wasn’t so prominent 5 years ago. This can only be good for photographers, artists and designers. The general populous benefit to and people get to have a wee taste of creativity in the process, this can only be good can it not? Pity the things are so bad at making phone calls eh?

At celtic connections the emphasis is often put on traditional music. For me – a person who has very solid roots in gaeldom what the Average White Band achieved in their day was nothing short of tradition forming. To me tradition is not about a specific genre (folk) or a particular sound (diddle) but the fervent and genuine want for people to master and create whatever it is they see fit at the time. For me the Average White Band are every bit as valuable to Scottish culture as say, Donald Riddle, Scott Skinner, The Macdonalds of Glenuig or even Robert Burns (Norman McCaig is my national poet).

So I’m a big fan of the Average White Band. Have been since I first started on the Bass and got my hooks into the funk. They are an exceptionally tight machine, regarded as kings of the genre and arguably one of Scotland’s most successful musical exports with Gold discs and Grammy nominations. I have to admit I was a little worried going to this show, these guys are heroes of mine and I wasn’t sure if they would live up to my high expectations or leave them shattered on the floor. I have to say that from the first note they pinned it. Total groove, tight as a fleas shit pipe.

Alan Gorrie plays and sings like he means it, this lot are not just turning out the hits by going through the motions. Onnie McIntyre, to my mind is one of the best rhythm guitarists the world has ever produced and to stand in front him and hear the attack of his amps and witness the ease and force with which he creates that groove is quite frankly, mind blowing. The rest of the band are equally hot, talent and funk just drips from them. My particular favourite was Mo Pleasure who was magnificent on the Bass, Keyboards and Guitar. He seems to have been hewn from a massive lump of primeval funk. Mo is in-fact a serious stalwart of funk history being musical director for Earth Wind & Fire and toured with Michael and Janet Jackson, not to mention Ray Charles. Holly Smokes; I think that makes Mo back-line royalty. Fred ‘Freddy V’ Vigdor on saxophone the only white addition to the line up is by no means average. Seering and charismatic with a particularly photogenic shirt. They were joined by Hugh and Cry and Niki King modern torch bearers of the Scottish soul flame, these guest stars gave the band some room to really perform and it has to be said that after Pat Kane started the crowd certainly lifted up a notch from the already buzzing atmosphere.

Why anyone thought the concert hall was the place to put a band of such booty shaking prowess is anyones guess. Maybe they thought they were past it, would play all the ballads and the fans would just be there for nostalgia and the odd sing a long. In fact this odd choice of venue turned out to be one of the most heart warming things I have witnessed over the whole festival. A few songs into the second half the audience could no longer contain themselves and despite the best efforts of security the place erupted in to a gyrating throng, blocking fire exits and dancing on their seats. Truly brilliant I cannot say how much I enjoyed seeing the reaction of the crowd and the security, the band simply intensified the groove and fanned the flames a little hotter. Classic…

The Average White bands are still legendary, totally fucking legendary, next time they’re here I’m there. They still cut it hard and deep, they are undoubtedly still one of Scotland’s best bands.

What can I say about Martha Reeves? She is an all time musical legend.

All I can say about this gig was that I had to leave after the fifth number. I couldn’t take it, it was simply to good!

The soul that emanates from this Lady is dazzling and fierce, add to this the fact that I could barely hold the camera for shaking my thang and that I was falling in love with both the Vandellas. I would love to consider myself a raucous wee soul G but in the end when faced with pure smouldering funk I had to turn tail and head for the hills.

Man Alive!

I’ve followed the Flecktones since the late nineties. Paul Jennings the drummer in the band I was in got a copy of Live Art (1996) and it blew our tiny minds.

Being a bassist I was instantly hooked on Victor Wooten’s charismatic, virtuoso take on the funk. In-fact his solo album “What did he say?” (1997) was part of the late nineties funk bomb that saw Jamiroquai’s “Travelling without Moving” (1996), Prince’s “Emancipation” (1997) and the “Return of the Headhunters” (1998). Man that was a good era for funk! Anything you imagined seemed achievable, the possibilities endless and bands like the Flecktones were out there forging new paths and redefining the limits of musicality, creativity and technical excellence. I don’t mind telling you this was a very formative period for me musically, artistically and philosophically. So yes Victor Wooten and all his brothers are heroes of mine and a major influence not only in music but on my whole outlook.

In funk I trust!

At that time I would say the the Flecktones were ostensibly a fusion band, mixing folk, blues-grass, blues, funk, jazz and even the odd bit of rock. However on witnessing what they played last night I would say that this fusion has developed and settled down into it’s own unique genre. What would you call this genre? Well; Flecktones I guess.

It’s hard to pin anything down listening to these guys. The melodies, chords, bass, beat and time signature seem to be continually evolving from one idea to the next. If it wasn’t for the absolute technical precision of the playing i would be inclined to liken it to a frenetic style of sketching. One thing is for sure, this band are at the cutting edge of musical innovation and have been ever since their inception. Even without the undeniable skill they posses their sense of adventure and gallus defiance in the face of blandness would be worthy of applause in itself. Well and truly a revelation.

http://www.flecktones.com/

Sometimes life becomes a little Abstract, you can’t really put your finger on anything and a mind swim ensues. I label these times as purple, it seems the appropriate colour for such vividly, non de-script moments. As much as purple is blue it is red. I quite often get struck by how weird things can seem in real life, the normal suddenly becoming surreal, intensely vague and wonderfully sad. Truth is – as they say – always stranger than fiction.

These photos serve no real purpose other than to provide some eye candy. Artistic types might well harp on about how abstraction can draw a viewer in. Give an insight which would not normally be grasped and to be fair I’d agree with them. However the modern world seems to have little time for such innocuous introspection and as a result – it would seem – neither do I.

Search for things that are illusive, chase them, capture them; then shrug them of as fleeting intangible moments of clarity. They are after all worthless.

That said, it’s important to note that the most expensive photo to ever be sold, is fairly abstract. A very geometric scene of the river Rhein, nature fitting nicely into human ideals of order and structure. It’s a nice picture in my view, well composed and coloured with plenty of high fidelity detail. Click here to see it.

So does this mean i value abstraction more. Because it is worth money? No! To find something abstract in real life is palpable, when you and you alone are witness to something unique. With the camera as a tool these moments can be captured and sometimes even manufactured. Whether you are witnessing the abstraction or seeking it out through experimentation what you are looking for is essentially the same. Something magical, un-earthly even spiritual but without the tools to record, ultimately lost.

Rant over, normal business will be resumed next week. I thank yaw!

This project has been a mammoth effort. Imagination, technique and patience have all been tested. The result is something which is radical for the genre in which this band are classed. The brief was ambitious and convoluted, trying to balance full frontal heavy metal edge with the staid sensibilities of the folk scene.

The main influence for the logo were ambigrams; ambigrams are words constructed into a bespoke typeface that enables the word to be read from any direction. This is and artform in itself highly time consuming and the end result is often something that only the font savvy can read. Here’s some examples. This was an enormous challenge; By it’s very definition a logo has to be relatively legible, in all honesty i’m big fan of convoluted, indecipherable glyphs, I find them engaging, they hold a lot a weight and if associated with something successful can elevate something from the mundane to cult status. However when taken in a modern context and especially in a music scene which is pretty conservative, this balls out approach was something that needed curbed. It’s fair to say that i created a lot of fonts to arrive at the final logo. What we arrived at was nothing anywhere near to the original brief but this is what development is all about, taking a creative ideal and forming it into something that people can still easily engage with. In fairness this logo is still not especially readable to a lot of people but in the end it’s something with a certain amount of individuality, it certainly looks more metal than folk but it certainly has a solid graphical footprint and is identifiable at any scale and on any background.

The cover art was a far more straight froward effort, again the final result was no where near the brief but the original idea was taken on, developed, grew it’s own legs and ended up forming itself. The album entitled origins had to reflect the bands traditional roots yet covey the modern influences of dance, metal, funk, jazz… The brief was based around tree roots, a simple and straight forward way to convey what the band wanted. So off I set into the woods on a bright summers day camera in hand and an eye on the bottom of trees. I must have walked about 8 or 9 miles on my quest and I certainly picked up lots of nice shots of treee roots; whilst wandering through the thicket I saw a fallen tree, it’s gnarled roots planted in a bog had lifted a huge pit of earth up with them and created a pretty sizeable pool. After snapping away at the roots for a minute I noticed that the pool was teeming with pond skaters. They look cool i thought, out came the macro lens and I tried to get the crosshairs onto them. Standing in a bog trying to get a shot of something 2cm long that move at speed with a 200mm macro lens is no mean feat. So I had to improvise, my light reflector was fashioned into an ad hoc mat and I lay on my stomach in the bog using my bag as a foundation for my elbows and shot there for a good half hour. I got the shots but when I stood up I realised that I, my relfector and my bag were pretty muddy and soaked through. A small price to pay for some photos which i’m not afraid to say i am pretty proud of.

Getting the graphic design done on this cover was also a long and winding road of collaborative development. Many long nights were spent in huddles round the mac, sometimes 6 or 7 people strong, trying out ideas, moving stuff around and trying to arrive at something that the whole band was happy with. I’m not afraid to say that this was testing job, patience wore very thin with pretty much everyone involved and at times it was hard to see how it would all hang together but perseverance is key in any creative endeavor. Slowly but surely the problems were solved and it was a valuable exercise in sideways thinking. It’s a credit to the band that they became so focussed and involved in the graphical portrayal of their music. They want to stand out, they want to push things forward and they put the hard work into achieving a balance that the record company, the fans, themselves and I were happy with.

Aside from all the hard hours spent in huddled development the website t-shirts and posters have all come together quickly. The website is a nice standard WordPress job, simple, effective and easy to manage. The t-shirts were done by the ever reliable bar-one, the print is nice and thick on lovely smooth 100% cotton shirts which have a lovely quality feel. Posters have yet to be printed but i’m looking forward to seeing the photographs in large scale.

This job is by no means over, the band are ambitious and in my opinion have the ability to cross over and enjoy a great deal of success, time will tell but in the meantime you can be rest assured that there will be videos, more photos, more music and more merchandise. We all have the bit between our teeth and the future of acid croft, turbo diddle, ethno thrash is well and truly on the blast. I have a lot of faith in what this band does and they have invested the same faith in me, this makes for a powerful partnership and I am confident that this shit will fly. Is the album artwork a timeless classic? I don’t know. Time and what the band do in the future will test it. One thing I do know is that it’s constructed from a lot of good peoples blood, sweat and soul.

— Website is here http://www.treacherousorchestra.com/

— And my post on the band photography is here.

It’s been a busy end to 2011 at the design hub. Models, prototypes and real life working machines have been flying out the door. Misha – mk whistles has been polishing at a feverish rate creating scenes like something from a space odyssey in the process. There was some stylish stationary ordered for select few 4c clients and Robin and Will posed for the Glasgow School of Art website. 2012 looks like an exciting year for everyone in the hub with projects coming from all angles and heights, so i’ll keep adding to the collection over the year. Here’s to the lot of us and all our clients in 2012. Slainte!

We had quite a time getting these done. Turning up early we were met with a locked door and not a soul in sight. Not a good start but our man Mutley eventually turned up with the keys and we swung in to action. We had chosen the main hall in the complex in SWG3 which is usually a club, It’s big dark and has a lovely concrete floor. Ideal. All the gear was hulked in and whilst i got the lamps and flashes warmed up the boys got their make up done, by the very capable Ashley Jane. Ashley did a great job of getting things tweaked the way I and the camera wanted them and needless to say it was a great source of entertainment.

Now taking photos of 11 people all of wildly different heights and shapes is no easy task. People move around and block the view of others, sometimes the light deflects badly and directing people to the correct position is a job which needs a good deal of patience. We started out trying to capture the classic band in a crowd shot. We nailed this after not to long and then moved on to jumping, moving around, looking all directions etc. This got everyone going and some momentum started to gather and enthusiasm lifted. After we had a good deal of these standard type shots in the bag we moved in to more adventurous territory. It struck me that 11 people in one picture is not an easy thing to make stand out. Luckily the Boys have plenty of charisma and all look individual and different but to capitalise on this I started to organise them in to rank and file got them to march, stand to attention, at ease and so on. This created a pleasing composition that stood out far more than the ad-hoc group shot.

So with group shots done we moved on to individual portraits. This is when the enthusiasm dried up and people began to become a little self conscience and stiffened up. My clever solution to this was to shout abuse ( given that i know them all this was quite easy ) and kind of attack and jab them with the camera. This not only created a cloud of foul language and insightful insults but also managed to create some nice animated shots that really got across some character. I also used these portraits to make up another group shot in post, where everyone is well lit, full frame detail and not obscured by anyone else. This again gave me control of composition and resulted in a sort of action figure toy soldier sort of feel.

When I went through the edit I was pretty pleased. Lots of good standard shots and the more constructed compositions stood out well. However I still felt I could achieve more edge, make them a little scarier more engaging. So I simply started painting peoples faces out, I know this is photography sacrilege but it achieved what I was looking for. In my view each member of the band had enough distinguishing character that removing their faces would actual highlight this. It’s true that people are drawn to other peoples faces but I think after a certain amount of faces is in one page it becomes confusing and actually harder for people to look at. Painting peoples faces away is something I’ve always done through illustration and drawing. I have often concentrated on peoples character and tried to convey this rather than a realistic representation of how they look.

— More at http://www.treacherousorchestra.com/gallery/

— And the post on the album design and promo material is here.