It’s increasingly easy to find excuses not to go out on a Saturday night, or indeed a Friday or any other night, at least if ‘going out’ means ‘being expected to move energetically in response to the promptings of rhythmic music’, i.e. dancing. But I just about managed it at the Trades club this evening. And it was welcome enough.
Discos/nightclubs — possibly the worst venue for photography, at least with my mediocre equipment. But, I don’t care! Because we were out in a nightclub! How 2010s is that?
OK, it’s Manchester, not New York… But it is The Producers. So it’s Broadway really. All together now… “Springtime…”
No one, for once, told me I couldn’t take photos during the performance so I got a couple. I’m quite pleased with this one, which is one of the few photos from which I have not cropped even a pixel; and considering the symmetry that’s worth noting.
It is of course impossible to produce a decent photo of people who are moving, in club lighting, with my crappy camera, without using a flash.
But one can try, dammit. One can try.
i3 (Information, Interactions and Impact) has been a good conference, and though Aberdeen, and particularly the Robert Gordon University campus, has done its bit to help, conferences are in the end about the people. So here are some of them, giving it a right old Scottish knees-up at the conference dinner.
If it’s the conference dinner, wheel out the folk dancers…. I sometimes wonder whether we should do this kind of thing with conferences in Manchester. You could take the delegates into a local nightclub, pour them blue WKDs and let them photograph the natives as they get down to it on a Friday night.
My hosts/friends at the Moscow School (the organisation that is the reason I come to visit Moscow so comparatively frequently) invited me to come to this event at the Russian Army Theatre this evening. Lots of folk dancing and its associated benefits like beautiful women, beautiful costumes and manly men doing manly things with swords, like these guys. And not done for the tourists either — in fact Russia is one of the few places in the world where this kind of cultural event is still seen as a normal evening’s entertainment, there were lots of families here tonight.
I still can’t quite grasp the nature of the Cossacks, are they a separate ethnic group, something one is born into, or a cultural choice one makes, sort of like declaring oneself a Celt or a Gaul? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m sure most of us would like an excuse to pull a face/pose like these two guys now and again.
And, by the way, I have one week left until day 1,000.
Another technically dubious picture of Russians letting it all hang out…. They do like a party, these guys.
Being 42 