Alasdair Watson

Hardly my best ever photo. Still, it’s a man with lightning up his arse. Who doesn’t love a picture of a man with lightning up his arse?

Still working through the White Mischief backlog, and here’s the last of the lead singers, Toby of Kunta Kinte, one of the organisers of the night. Not got very much to say about this one.

I also have a small collection of photos that I’ll put up in the next day or two from a couple of birthday parties at the weekend, and I’ll probably put one or two of them across here, but since they’re mostly of family and friends, and therefore of limited interest, I won’t put the lot on here.

Doesn’t work are full res, but it’ll do for a web shot. Common wisdom regarding concert photography is that microphones and their stands are bad things to have in shot, but I rather like them here.

For the avoidance of doubt, though: Charlie (pictured) is actually very tall, not some strange midget, as this photo might make him look.

Y’know, I’ve had to disclaim two things about this shot. Perhaps that ought to tell me something…

A shot of our hostess for the night, Mysti Vine. I can’t quite decide how I feel about this – either the shot is a sucess because of the way her eyes stand out of the picture, or the fact that they do is ruining it. I honestly don’t know. I suppose they are, at least, striking.

This is perhaps a fairly extreme example of my tendency to leave lots of space in my photos of people – I tend to allow a person at most two thirds of the frame, and I tend to prefer it if they’re kept down to a third of the frame. It’s one of the reasons I don’t do conventional portraiture very often, because I don’t like shots that are just about the person in them. A little more space in the shot is my attempt to remind the viewer that the subject exists in a wider context…

Stephen Coates, the lead singer of The Real Tuesday Weld, the only band from White Mischief not yet featured on this blog, in part at least because I only have one other decent photo of them, so I’ve been holding back.

Re the title: For all sorts of reasons, Mr Coates’ performance reminds of nothing quite so much as a strange man of god from a not-quite-normal world, and I think this shot, and its title catch reflect that as best I can manage.

OK, I confess – the commentary in the last two photos about how you almost never see the drummer in photos was just set-up for the this shot of one of Kunta Kinte’s drummers.

Well, not entirely. They have two, and the other went unphotographed (by me, at any rate) because he was in the traditional position at the back of the stage. It seems slightly unfair to me, that one drummer gets to be front of stage while the other languishes at the back, but y’know, I got this photo of a drummer, so I can’t complain too much…

For as long as I’ve been going to Flipron gigs, I’ve been trying to get a decent shot of their keyboard player, and I have finally managed it. I feel that I may now die in peace.

Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it has proved very hard to get a shot of him that was in focus, without motion blur, and a decent composition. 2 out of three, I have managed several times, but this is the first time I’ve got all three.

Now if I could just do the same for the drummer…