you and me both

Say what you like about the west coast and sunsets over Arran and gulfstreams and palm trees in Culzean and so on; the east coast is far better for early-morning silky-water stuff. Still, fresh sea air at daybreak is fresh sea air at daybreak even when there are distinctly sewagey undernotes to the air. I did get a couple of nice sunrise-clouds on the way back in after the early-morning trundle to the seafront but most of the long-exposure stuff didn't really work. Think I'll just wait until December again then head back to Joppa.

Hmmm. I thought we'd be getting away nice and early today so that we could get some weekend time to call our own. It seems instead I must spend a couple of hours going through a list of apparently randomly-selected Ayrshire-based wedding photographers' websites screwing my face up involuntarily every few seconds. I thought we'd covered this section a couple of months ago when we said we were getting one of Nicky's colleagues to do it. Apparently not after there was a edding-equipment-and-supplier supplement with the Local Paper the other week. A few of those listed are easy to disqualify outright when they fail to feature a single well-exposed picture on the entire site. It's slightly less easy to explain to Nicky's mother (seemingly hellbent on hiring a purveyor of cheesily formulaic simper-shots who will charge upwards of 800 quid for downwards of 36 by-the-numbers prints) exactly what is wrong with some of them. I am assured that it was much worse six years ago for her sister as far fewer local photographers had websites so the selection process involved traipsing round town looking in studio windows. HMMM. We did at least find one who featured some nice candids of people wearing GENUINE EXPRESSIONS rather than the dead-around-the-eyes grimace normal to cheesebag set-up shots whose work we can use as an example of the sort of picture we want.

We seem to be having the same issue with the band selection: we have found a band who are free on the necessary date and whose samples tunes I liked. I usually screw my face up at wedding band samples too, particularly the ones with nasty MIDI backing or an overpowering electric bass swamping the tootly and squeaky instrumentation. Attempting to explain this to someone who doesn't even seem to listen to the explanation... I could possibly employ the same technique and ignore anything I dislike the sound of but I just want to try and get her to understand (or at the very least just respect) someone else's point of view. Instead we're being informed that "You want someone who can fill up the dancefloor" and "You don't want someone who plays nothing but set dances... ...you want a sort of disco thing in between" which certainy surprised me. Thankfully Nicky claims to have heard "Just go ahead and book this lot if you like them" at some point when my internal scream became too loud.

AAAAGH. I want to just run outside and go for a big, fast walk until it's time to finally leave but that would leave Nicky alone and undefended. Bugger. Batteries are going in my Jornada. AAAAAGH. That's two and an half hours already AND we've got to stay for at least another plate-of-soupsworth of time before we can escape. It's going to be almost bloody dark by the time we get home. AAAAAAGH.

***

On the plus side, on the walk I later took I discovered that standard packeted muffins only contain half the fat of their larger ISB brethren.