David Emery Online25 x 5
Last weekend saw the annual trek down the M4 to that ode to concrete that is Reading. The festival – as ever – was brilliant; the weather held out and the music was wonderful. I treat Reading a little different to most people, I think – there are just too many bands to pursue the “normal” festival experience (i.e. drinking copious amounts of bear, mainly). I have a schedule, and I stick to it.
It’s fun, honest.
To that end this year I saw a whopping 25 bands, which I think is pretty good going. Now, I’m not going to bore you with 25 full on reviews of all those bands – I don’t think you want to read that and I certainly don’t want to write it. Instead, I’m going to do 5 word reviews of each – I think you’ll get the idea a lot quicker that way.
So, here’s my Reading Festival 2008 in 125 words:
Pete And The Pirates
Practically perfect pop home coming.
Blood Red Shoes
Great noisy boy – girl indie.
These New Puritans
Sparkly dancy prog. Yes, prog.
Dizzee Rascal
Really got the crowd going.
Read more ➔Photocopy
Today I’d like to talk a little about copyright, Flickr, fair use and thumbnails.
On the XL Recordings website that we launched back in March we pull in news, videos and photos from a variety of sources in a tumblelog-style. Most of these are from sources we run or control like band websites, myspaces, youtube profiles or from sites we have good relationships with. The only exception of that is the photos we pull in from Flickr, which mostly come in from the main Flickr groups for each artist (here’s Radiohead’s one, for example).
When we designed the site I was very wary about making some kind of semi-official spam-blog – a spam-blog being a blog packed with advertising that passes off someone else’s content as their own, normally using an RSS feed. So, to that end we made sure that it was really obvious where the content was coming from and added prominent links back to the original sources. In the case of photos, we only use 75×75 pixel thumbnail, each of which links back to the original photo on Flickr. I thought we had stuck a good balance between respecting the authors of the original content and...
Read more ➔Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Really interesting stuff – I particularly like the object removal demo (fast forward to 5:58 to see it):
Visit ➔Olympus / Panasonic announce Micro Four Thirds
Olympus and Panasonic have just announced a new type of sensor for digital cameras, which is probably the biggest innovation in this space we’ve seen in a very long time. It means that they can now make interchangeable lens cameras without the bulky mirror box, meaning (hopefully) we will get much smaller cameras that retain the image quality (and lens swap-ability) of an DSLR.
Visit ➔Days with My Father
Photographer Phillip Toledano documents a series of photographs of his elderly father; beautiful and heartbreaking.
Visit ➔Cool
Yesterday I popped down to DPMHI in Soho to check out The Cool Kids ‘Bake Sale’ – think an in-store, but with cookies and beer (what event isn’t better with the addition of cookies and beer?). It was – of course – great fun, and was all in aid of promoting The Cool Kids’ album ‘The Bake Sale’ (hence the cookies…) which is out in August.
The Cool Kids aren’t the normal indie-shmindie that normally graces these pages; they’re hip hop, and good hip hop at that. It’s not a genre that I normally frequent in quite frankly, but ‘The Bake Sale’ is one of my most listened to albums of the last couple of months. It’s got groove – if you’re not normally a hip hop listener I heartily recommend it.
Here’s the video for ‘Black Mags’ as a little sampler – for more check out their MySpace:
Of course, I took a few photos while I was there – need to get a wide angle lens though…
Read more ➔Project 365 was difficult today
Regular readers (and irritated friends/co-workers) may know that this year I’m undertaking a photography exercise called Project365. The concept is simple: everyday, I take a photo. Come rain or shine, illness or busyness each and everyday a photo must be taken.
So far, I’ve managed it.
Just.
Unsurprisingly, some days it’s harder then others. The inspiration isn’t there maybe, or the opportunity never arises. More days then not are almost exactly the same for me, on a general scale, as I imagine they are for most people; wake up, go to work, go for lunch, do more work, go home. Repeat.
This isn’t so much of a problem to start with – each of these different activities has quite a few photos in them; your walk to work, the immediate area around your desk (and your colleagues – sorry again!), the park you have lunch in etc. Then their are the less regular traditional photo opportunities to mix things up with – mostly gigs in my case.
However, after about 3 months or so the burn kicks in. You’ve taken all the easy pictures, the ones that don’t take any effort. You find yourself in a panic at about 11:30 in the evening prowling round...
Read more ➔The Big Picture - Boston.com
Simple but perfect – a blog showcasing exceptional news photography, with nice and large photos.
Visit ➔Bon Iver at St Giles Church
Well, I’ve been a bit busy recently and for that I apologise. Hopefully now I may well be past the main hump of stuff that has kept me far too occupied, of which I will show you some of shortly. Of course, every time I think things may get quieter they get busier, but it’s far better to be busy, isn’t it?
It’s not all work work work though – there’s been plenty gig going and music watching eating into my time as well. Last night was bar far and away the highlight though, with Bon Iver playing St Giles Church in central London. I’ve gone on about Bon Iver here before and with good reason – his album, ‘For Emma Forever Ago’ is probably my favourite album of the year, packed full of amazingness (which should really be a word).
It’s a beautiful piece of work.
Somehow though, live it manages to be even better; I’d go as far as to say that yesterday may well be my favourite gig of the year – if not the last few years, for that matter – with only Radiohead at the BBC running it close. The setting – a proper, active church –...
Read more ➔Escape (Great)
So the Great Escape 2008 has well and truly been done. It was unsurprisingly great fun; the music was good, my panel talk was very interesting and stimulating and it was great to meet up with lots of people (even if I did dash back to London a little early so didn’t spend quite enough time with any of them).
Of the bands seen, I think Fanfarlo and The Futureheads at Digital on Thursday were probably the highlights – Fanfarlo’s indie pop gets better every time I see it and it was great to see a band like Futureheads in such a small, intimate venue.
As always, here are some photos – you can see all of them on Flickr:
