Most of us struggle to do one thing tolerably well but not only is my friend Stephen a very talented & able photographer he's a fantastic guitar player as well; Southern Aces is his new band and he asked me to shoot some pictures of them in action on their first public gig and they were pure dead brilliant, as they say back home.

Tricky lighting conditions (is it ever anything else with gigs?) but manual exposure & a little clever post-production yeilded some pretty nice results, and Stephen's new Telecaster semi-acoustic really is a thing of beauty

Almost inspiring enough to make me want to go and practice that tricky Am9, but then frankly it's simpler just to avoid all songs that use that chord...