The Return...

Sky have hooked up broadband in the flat, its costing £10 a month for Sky for unlimited downloady and £13.50 a month from BT. Sure the whole thing could be cheaper, but £23.50 a month between two people ain't so bad, heck its's barely two beers.

In the weeks and months since I've had such bandwidth, I've had loads of ideas of stuff to blog about in detail, such as:-

• That advert where the girl makes whale noises and says she's like a 'fish out of water', with no idea what 'fish out of water' means
• How the Housing Benefit cap affects very few people and just those in London, and possibly proposing a lower cap for other parts of the country, based on regional average rents.
• More videos of me playing cover versions on guitar and dreaming of being in a band
• Madcap money making schemes
• Drawings
• Reviews of stuff
• Photies of the dinner I cooked today

But really my heart isn't in it so much.

I went to The Plimptons first ever London gig last Thursday night, it was the first time I'd since them in about two years, maybe more. I took lots of photies. Its taken me a few days to get round to putting them through Photoshop and upload to Flickr and Songkick.

Actually, there's a wee gap in the website market there, maybe its been filled by various applications and more recent version of stuff, but the gap in the market is this:- to upload a batch of around fifty photos to Flickr, Songkick, Facebook, blog and MySpace, I need to upload them five times, I'd rather like to just upload them once, fill in the titles and tags and descriptions once, and some web app/service copies them to each of the aforementioned social networks.

Sure, you can share Flickr photies on Facebook, but its much better to have natively hosted photies there, and you can't link photies into Songkick, they host their own.

I don't care about all those network's server space, not my problem if they all hold duplicate photies, I just don't want to have to upload it all five times.

Anyhoo, so I slung up a few dozen photies, and I'm quite proud of them. My style is black and white, blurry, dark and high-contrast.

I feel very self-conscious using the flash on my camera, its not that I think people will mind, its more of that they'll see it at all. By raising the black level and lowering the white level, its brings out more detail in what would otherwise be dark shots in dark venues.

It was only after I'd taken a few photies that I realised the candle in the shot would just be a big white spot rather than anything recognisable.

Cropping shots so that they are wide and narrow, I like those too, it makes up for if I've accidentally cut someone's head off in the original shot, I just cut everyone up, and it helps draw the viewer's attention to stuff like the pint Martin's holding.

I'm also quite fond of crowd shots, not only to show that there are actually other people at the gigs I go to, but also, the type of person, whether they're paying attention to the band on stage or talking amongst themselves, how many other photographers there are.

I like to think that this sort of photo is iconic, the act of the singer being photographed is more important than the shot itself.

Sometimes the shots are so blurry, there's nothing for it but to crank up the cropping and the levels so much, and it kind of ends up looking good. This could be an album cover, or a t-shirt or wallpaper or something.

So, The Plimptons third album "00s Nostalgia with The Plimptons" is launched 20th November 2010 at Nice n Sleazy in Glasgow, and its great, I know, cos I've heard it.