FLATSTEVE carny type:

Shown below is the temporary page I was asked to speedily design before the pubs opening.

Logo design by Studio Harringman.

The website runs on WordPress – implementing an entirely custom theme, designed by yours truly.

We chose to custom design a WordPress website as a means for Alan to add and update his photography portfolio in his own time, whenever he sees fit. Sure it meant twice as much work and twice as many headaches as it possibly would have done if I went down the static page coding route – but Alan now has a website that is truly his own.

Sneak peak; Alan Drummond Photography – logo design:

Rachel returns next Friday (16/09/2011). Living in Anniesland has been chill, it’s nice having actual cycle paths (non-existent in the East End), plus the Forth and Clyde Canal is ideal on a sunny day. Safe to say I’ll miss the place, but not as much as my furry companion (what a pansy).

It’s not all bad – I’m moving in with my best pal Graham and his girlfriend in Finnieston. Graham owns an extravagant selection on analogue synthesisers… let the noise making commence.

It was great to get away from a computer for a while. Days spent on the beach, nights on the rocks (literaly) and a roll of black and white 35mm film.

Some pictures to illustrate the fun. The full set is available on my Flickr.

Working in IT I’m very much reliant of the digital paradigm. The majority of everything I produce can be broken down to its binary form, a form that has no meaningful physical state. The words I write, the photos I capture, they exist as representations in memory locations -without computation they mean nothing.

I was sitting on the train back to my parent’s house yesterday, leafing through a set of prints I recently had developed of a day out in Oban, listening in on the kids sitting across from me as they lampooned my archaic medium. The gist of their derisions accumulated to; if it won’t go on Facebook, why did you bother?

When I handed my film camera to a stranger, on said day in Oban, to take a picture of Jo and I (see scan below), he depressed the shutter then went to look for an LCD screen to review:

“Its film, you’ll need to wait a while till you can see that…”

“Oh, that’s… cool”

The guy (about the same age as me) looked genuinely baffled– not in a bad way, just surprised.

Let me ask a question. Remember back in the day (ha) when you had Bebo, a 56K connection and a Dell/Tiny 800MHz desktop your folks bought from Comet – how many pictures did you lose when you switched to Facebook, got broadband and joined the multi-core revolution? I’m not assuming everyone did, but when transitioning I bet some of you forgot to backup files, files which held dear memories, files that would have been better stored in a more physical format.

Digital storage seems to devalue importance. Pictures are important to me. The photo-processor is going to busy…

P.S I’ll print this post to avoid hypocrisy ;)

Recently I inherited my Granda’s twenty-one year old Nikon F-801 35mm film camera, a bundle of Nikkor lenses and his old SB-24 Speedlight.

Every time the shutter snaps I’ll remember him. Cheers Geo.

My new web design project for Charlton Chauffeur Drive (Glasgow) went live today (04/08/11).

Click the image to open in a new tab.

This appreciation began through a friend introducing me to the ambient electronic genre. Listening to bands like Boards of Canada, The Album Leaf, Bonobo and Aphex Twin, I had discovered a style of music that allowed me to work whilst I listened.

Guitar is a passion of mine, so it was only natural that I got into “Post Rock” (quoted – as some of my favourite bands hate to be blanketed under this term) through the music of Glasgow legends, Mogwai. I only started fully appreciating their work in the last few years, and most poignantly in my year in Toronto, where I experienced a live screening of their ‘Burning’ DVD on a 6ft x 6ft projector accompanied by a dozen or more colossal speakers. For a room of three hundred or so people to be utterly transfixed watching a tiny flickering screen, listening to the wall of noise that is Helicon pt. 2 was a moving experience.

A spark was lit. Since then the music of This Will Destroy You, Explosions in the Sky, Caspian, Tortoise and the likes, have been prominent fixtures in my playlists.

Accompanied by a few of my friends, I attended the Godspeed You! Black Emperor gig in Glasgow last weekend. They played a two and a half hour set of dazzling interwoven melodies, crushing crescendos, and beautifully resolved endings. Their musicianship is unparalleled; a nine piece band that can produce such tight yet passionate music is astounding. Each instrument compliments the other so much that I found myself staring for an age (they play twenty minute epics) at the guitarist trying to work out what the hell melody was the one he was playing.

Great gig, good friends, buzzing ears – good night.

I’ve always had a website – just never a blog. I never really had much to say or show on a weekly basis, but I’ve been busy recently and I wanted a platform to vent this productivity/ramble nonsense.

If anyone reads this you probably already know me, or you are a massive dork, or both – preferably both.