During my trip to Houston, my friend Jay, a professional photographer with top-of-the-line camera and a mini-studio in his living room, took a whole bunch of extremely high resolution pictures of my baroque violin, my new pochette, my 18th century Highland pipes, and my Scottish smallpipes. The pictures are pretty gigantic, so I'll have to shrink them a bit before putting them up on the site, but the detail is fantastic.

I'll probably turn the medium-size frame for these instruments into a thumbnail gallery instead.

Jay dropped me off at Memorial park to practice, and he took a few pictures of me playing while his wife and son went to the dog park. Apparently my playing attracted the attention of a Roguette, one of the fan-girls of the pipe & drum ensemble "The Rogues of Scotland", now fronted my my piping idol, EJ Jones. She stopped to listen to me play for nearly 30 minutes, and waved as she departed during my last set. It's a comfort to know that I impressed a member of that esteemed fanclub.

And speaking of Jay's son Liam, the little 7 month old lad really enjoyed the pochette, even more than he enjoyed the fiddle. We guess that the reason was that it was more in his ears' range, or possibly just because it's baby-sized.

Update: The new images are now up, in the fiddling and piping sections!