How surveillance capitalism saved my lockdown blues.
Andrew Roachford MBE playing live in Edinburgh’s Liquid Room, 26 May 2022.
Surveillance capitalism or just the luck of the Irish?
You know how it goes, you hear a song on the radio from back in the day that stirs your beating heart and you think to yourself, I’ll have some more of that.
“Hey Siri, play Roachford”, followed by the predictably irritating, “Here’s something I found on the internet…” A few, actually quite a few, expletives later I grabbed my laptop and carefully set my coffee cup down a safe distance from the keyboard - I have a bit of pervious with coffee and MacBooks!
I googled Mr Roachford and the memories came flooding back. Next, I fired up YouTube on the TV and listened to a selection of his best work. I enjoyed my evening singing along and searching track by glorious track for more from an old favourite.
This was early 2022 and we were coming out of the pandemic, all vaccinated with freedoms beckoning.
The next morning I’m at my desk, working away, and I notice an email dropping into my inbox telling me Roachford is on tour and will be playing the Liquid Room in Edinburgh in May. I then noticed various ads (the ones inserted into news feeds and articles) for concerts and gigs on my iPhone. Hmmm, was this a case of surveillance capitalism at play I wondered?
I later thought, after booking my ticket, that this was the first time I had been served a relevant ad and actually followed through with a purchase.
It had always made me smile, that with all the data the tech companies harvest on us just how awful their ad targeting actually is. Why, for example, when you buy an item on Amazon do you get badgered to buy the same item again and again! Anyway, who says surveillance capitalism is all bad!
Andrew Roachford MBE played his heart out in front of an appreciative audience on 26 May 2022 in Edinburgh’s Liquid Room. It was a truly great evening, intimate and relaxed, and I was able to get up close to one of my favourite artists and snap away to my heart’s content and that’s rare these days!
Mr Andrew Roachford MBE
Roachford is a British singer-songwriter who scored his first success in 1989 with the hits "Cuddly Toy" and "Family Man".
I was really pleased to see his contribution to music recognised with his appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to music.
The best camera for the job
The pictures here were taken, maybe rather surprisingly, on my iPhone 13 Pro Max set to capture RAW images (DNGs in this case).
This does rather validate the argument that the best camera is the one you have with you, and to a greater or lesser extent, that it’s not all about the gear!
Post production
A legend, however, does deserve a considered edit and I went with ON1 and a Kodak Tri-X 400 look and feel in tribute to the 80s which I felt drew out the soul of the pictures and gave me a nice high contrast look with enough detail in the shadows without blowing out the highlights.
Kodak's Professional Tri-X 400 Black and White Negative Film is a classic high-speed panchromatic film claimed by Kodak to be the world’s best selling Black and White film used by some of the greats such as Sebastião Salgado and Michael Kenna. Tri-X has been in production since 1954 and even though it has been refined over the years, it still possesses a character all of its own with its distinctive grain structure. An extremely flexible film with wide exposure latitude. One of the best films for pushing and you need that for concert photography, as they say.
While the iPhone makes a reasonable fist of things in low light the computational emphasis on the final product is predictably overcooked, and honestly, just awful.
Thankfully with the RAW files on your iPhone you can take back control in post production and then it just becomes another editing challenge in post.
I hope you like my final take on ‘Mr Rochford comes to Edinburgh’? He was as glorious as I had dared hope and I thank him for a wonderful evening’s entertainment.
PS Andrew if you ever come across this blog I will happily send you the images with my compliments. Get in touch!
THE LIQUID ROOM, 9C VICTORIA STREET, EH1 2HE, EDINBURGH.
Roachford – Studio Live…
Two fantastic interviews and five magnificent tracks in one playlist.
