Brass: Durham International Festival – A few Photos

The Durham International Brass Festival kicked off on Saturday and I was volunteering so I took along my camera.

There’s a whole bunch and the festival is on for another week and a half so I’ll add more later but just thought I would stick a few up now.

This guy is from the Band that I chaperoned around the festival. They are called Imperial Kikiristan and they are AWSEOME!

This photo was taken just after they were chased by a security guard for playing on top of a bin – when backup arrived they ran form the scene mimicking a police siren on their sax and set up on top of this bin down the street instead (just out of shot)…

Brass Festival website

Imperial Kikiristan website

This next photo I really like. It looked good in colour, B&W and re-touched but I really liked the idea of making it feel a bit ‘Seventies’. It was a super hot day and reminded me of old photos of may parents during that crazy heatwave that happened back then. Also with it being a brass festival it sounds a bit ‘old fashioned’ even though for the past three years it hasn’t been at all, but you know with the whole colliery bands and miners gala and all of that – it kind of felt right.

Recent Work – New Scuba Website

Just a quick one to say that I finished the design on a new website for Durham City Scuba. I handed it over about a week ago so it should be sufficiently filled with all kinds of scuba related info.

The guys at DCS are awesome so if you fancy a bit of scuba diving it’s the place to go.

Check them out…

www.durhamcityscuba.co.uk

Correction – Paul Rudd’s beard will kind of save your blog!

So, it’s been a while since my last post but in my defence I’ve been super busy. It has also given me more time to monitor the Paul Rudd theory and the results are in.

Basically it kind of worked! OK I wasn’t flooded with thousands of hits (by blog simply isn’t that big yet) but it is the second most popular post on my blog, only slightly beaten by one of the first posts I did ages ago – so by all accounts it does actually work that way – HUZZAHHH!

Okey doke, now it’s time to figure out how to get my blog out to the masses in other ways. Watch this space…

I made up this joke…

Ok, so I made up this series of jokes and I feel the need to claim it before it spreads into the ether you know, cos it’s clearly mint!

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Soz
Soz who?
Ah it’s ok I’ll let you off

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Lend is a tab
Lend is a tab who?
Sorry I don’t smoke

Knock knock
Who’s there?
Hew man
Hew man who?
Alright, take it easy!

There we go, you are welcome!

Paul Rudd’s beard will save your blog!

That’s right folks! Or at least I think it is – this is kind of like a test to see if my theory is right. You see, yesterday I was talking to my good friend Kate about how I can get more people to read my blog and my theory is that if you make your headline a combination of irrelivant, relevant and niche the readers will come.

I’m fairly new to blogging so I’m tring to get my head around it but one of the things I noticed is that if I ramble about something irrelevant and then have something design related to boot I get a good few readers. For example, my second post was entitled ‘ The BEST carrot cake in the world… and how to make a favicon‘ and I got a bunch of hits – I’m guessing it was equally as much for the carrot cake comment as it was for the tutorial – in fact if you type ‘best carrot cake’ into google UK I rank 7th!

so then, this post is the test, and the thought process behind it is this:

• Paul Rudd is popular but not mainstream massive
• He had a great beard, which as a lover of beards I appreciated and so will other beard lovers
• Lots of people search for tips on blogging
• The weird title combo should stand out in the crowd

I’ll keep an eye on how this goes and update on here in a week or so…

…and just so I’m not dissapointing people by making this post nothing to do with Paul Rudd’s beard (which would just be annoying so don’t do that) here is a wonderful picture of Rudd’s amazing hairy face… DAMN he looks good for 40!

A Ruddy good beard

If you came accross this blog post because of the above reasons, please leave a comment – thanks!