Outdoors

Merchant City Festival 2024

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DOCUMENTING GLASGOW’S MERCHANT CITY FESTIVAL 2024

The Merchant City Festival 2025 is just around the corner and I’ll be photographing it again this year so I thought now would be the perfect time to share some of last year’s images.

The 2024 outing took place from Friday 19 to Sunday 21 July in Glasgow’s Merchant City district. Over the weekend, around 35,000 people enjoyed free outdoor arts and circus performances, interactive theatre, family ceilidhs, puppet shows, and science activities. There were daily markets, international street food, and evening live music. It was all very colourful and a joy to photograph. See some of the 2024 images below:

GEAR:
Nikon Z8 x 2
Nikkor Z 70-200 f2.8
Nikkor Z 14-24mm f2.8
Nikkor Z 85mm f1.2
Nikkor Z 35mm f1.8
Tiffen Black Pro-mist 1/4 Filters

Mela Festival 2024

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Photographing Mela Festival at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park.

The Glasgow Mela is Scotland's biggest free multicultural festival of music, dance, and arts held annually at Kelvingrove Park. This year it took place on Sunday, June 23rd, it attracted some 40,000 people and I was there to capture the event for Glasgow Life. Honestly, this was such a joy to photograph and I hope the images below convey that.

GEAR:
Nikon Z8
Nikkor Z 70-200 f2.8
Nikkor Z 14-24mm f2.8
Nikkor Z 85mm f1.2
Nikkor Z 35mm f1.8
Tiffen Black Pro-mist 1/4 Filters

Mugdock Park

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Portraits in Mugdock Park

Mugdock Country Park is one of my favourite outdoors spaces to photograph in. It’s easily accessible from Glasgow and not too remote. There are bits of it that feel like remote countryside, places that are lush green and overgrown with ferns. You can find meadows, huge trees, water, there are even ruins of a castle - basically a never-ending source of photo inspiration and despite having done numerous shoots there over the years, I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of the park. In fact, I got lost there for a bit on a shoot last year, wandering in a wooded area in circles. Below you can see one image from every shoot I’ve done in Mugdock Park so far. Enjoy.

COP26 Activists

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portraits of climate activists at cop26 in Glasgow

The COP26 theme is back, hope you don’t mind - it was a busy couple of weeks for Glasgow! This was a really enjoyable job which, after the seemingly never-ending lockdowns, made me feel excited about photography again.

Project Everyone is a United Nations Global Partner for SDG Advocacy and Outreach which seeks to put the power of communications behind the Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the Global Goals, and I was asked to take photos of their climate justice activists who arrived in Glasgow from all over the world for the conference. It was a beautiful sunny November day and the shoot took place in Broomielaw area of the city where Global Goals put up a huge billboard displaying giant post-it notes with their 17 sustainability goals. Each activist was asked to pick a goal close to their heart and got photographed in front of it. Here’s a selection of images from that day:

GEAR
Nikon D850
Nikkor 85mm f1.4
Nikkor 50mm f1.4
Tiffen Black Pro-mist 1/4 Filter

Kathleen MacInnes

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I’ve known Kathleen MacInnes, a brilliant Gaelic singer, for quite a while and have photographed her live on several occasions (mainly for Ceol’s Craic events) and it was a joy to be asked to do a proper session with her. We spent a lovely summer evening in Govan’s Dry Docks earlier this year and I’m including some of the final images below.

GEAR
Nikon D850 + Nikkor 85mm f1.4
Tiffen Black Pro-mist 1/4 Filter