The BBC Big Band
Extraordinary lead trumpet player, Mike Lovatt (third from the left), invited me to bring my son, Zak, along to a recording session of the BBC Big Band.
That’s Zak (he plays trumpet), behind the extraordinarily stellar trumpet section.
The stars are (from left to right):
Brian Rankin, Derek Taylor, Mike Lovatt and Martin Shaw (my jazz trumpet teacher!) .
Meanwhile, over on the left side of the room there are more superstars:
Trombones, from left to right: Liam Kirkman, Gordon Campbell, Andy Wood
Conductor (and superstar jazz trombonist): Mark Nightingale
Drums: Tom Gordon
Piano: Gwylm Simcock
Needless to say, this band sounded ridiculously good!
They say the recording will go out on BBC radio 2 on a Monday evening, sometime soon, at 9:00.
Photomerge experiments
First, a photo of some rivers I took from the window of an aeroplane last week. I’m not kidding! I was flying from Beijing to London and it was daylight all the way. I think this may have been somwhere in Siberia or Russia. I don’t really know. The curves of the rivers are beautiful.
It would have been an even nicer photo if the Boeing 777′s windows were a bit cleaner…
A few days later I was at an informal concert given by Urban Sounds at a school in Islington. I took some photos because Zak and Mo, both my sons, were playing. For no particular reason I chose this one (with Zak singing through an old hacked telephone), plus the Siberian rivers to do some merging experiments:
And again, using different merging rules….
And finally something completely different. It’s a monochrome portrait photograph of Zak processed to look a bit like a fine pencil drawing on a textured surface. In front is a photograph I took of the Liver Building in Liverpool which I “tiltshifted” using Lightroom to make it look like something small and close, rather than big and far away. It’s a trick with depth of field.
Again, I had no particular reason to use these two photos – I just did it on a whim. 
My kids, as they were 8 years ago
Here are my kids, as they were 8 years ago.
Photo taken June 2002 on a Central Line train, London.
From left to right: Zak, Martha, Mo, Emily.
