Boozy Floozy Burlesque @ the Galaxy

This was the first show the Boozy Floozys have put on at the Galaxy, there will be 5 more, the next being on ... February .... 25th .... I beleive tix are 10 bucks, but don't quote me on that.



I didn't get there until 7, I had work prior to the show. I got there and everyone was already there getting ready. I got myself in through the back door.















Manual focus in the dark. Oh yes.












off with her dress!






they had so many cool new acts!



this one was fun. girl walks in on her bf with another girl .... oooo. fighgting ensues ...






You might think she takes him back ... I won't give the ending completely away, but I think it could use more blood and guts ...










ballet vs boozy?



boozy wins ....









I love the balloon dance ... its easily one of my favs.



and well just end it there.

SOOO much better than at Gin Joint. The Galaxy works really freakin well for this. The lighting is much better, the stage is huge, real curtains, lots of room for people and viewing. backstage is much better. it was just a lot better experiance. There where a few bumbles during the show, but nothing too major, I mean hell, i twas the first time the galaxy did anything like this. Things are expected, but I think it ended up working out really well, there was a pretty large crowd for it and I think they really enjoyed it, hopefully the turnout at the next one will be even larger.

www.myspace.com/boozyfloozyburlesque

I shot this one almost completely ambient. I used some bounce flash in the dressing rooms, the rooms where whitish and small enough that the bounce came out looking natural, I really think that bounce flash is really overused by photographers in venues it is really not meant to be used in. Bounce is used to create a more natural light, but often times, the ceilings are too high or too dark, and you end up lighting the tops of their heads with the rest of the faces in darkness ... completely unnatural looking light. No fun. If I am going to make it look unnatural, I am shooting straight into them or I will use it as a fill. The light on the stage of the galaxy was not terrible. There are a lot of bw conversions simply because I disliked the color of the light. I hate when individual color channels get blown out, its super easy to happen ... and there really isn't much you can do as far as returning the color down to a reasonable level, and bw just is much more appealing to look at. BW Vs Color is 100%aestheticic. sometimes I like color, sometimes I prefer the simplicity of tones.

and heres the rest of that blog I started the other day!

...



I focused a lot on textures of the area ... looking down ....







I like them. This was my .... 4th time out to the sea ....



Takugi being a Pokemon master.





This is Salvation Mountain, it is amazing. Located near Nihland at the entry to Slab City.

http://www.salvationmountain.us/

this is another of the must stop tourist destinations of the area, and yes, it is a tourist destination.



This is Leanard the founder and mostly sole builder of the "mountain". He constructed it almost compltely out of adobe and paint. Most of the paint he uses is donated by visitors. Go out to see him, say hi, give him a can of paint (he likes blues and greens especially) and he will gladly give you a tour. Speak loud, he is deaf in his left ear.





this was a small part of a large mural on a silo near Salvation Mountain. Really neat stuff.



After Salvation we went back to Bombay Beach to enjoy the sunset.



and what an amazing sunset it was!



we sat down on the barnecle and dead fish crusted coast on a couple of blankets, enjoyed some drinks, and very much enjoyed the scenery.











Takugi Skipping some stones.



this is the last shot I did. It is an old crane I discovered earlier in the day. I wanted to go back and photograph it at night with getto strobe (canon 550EX). This is a 30 second exposure at 800 ISO and I am just walking (very quickly and in complete dark, yes I fell a couple of times) around the thing with my flash popping it where I feel like it needs some light. This was once on the left, once on the right, twice behind the crane to the rear, and once behind the crane towards the camera. Not a whole lot of post. Minor cropping, tweaks to the color and saturation, and thats it.

We drove around the eastern shore of the sea ... some of the best stuff though is on the western shore ... next time I want to go back and visit salton beach, desert shoes, and salton city ... and I really want to go farther south to the new river ... next time ...

the Salton Sea adventure 2010

My roomate Chris decided that for his birthday he wanted to have a photo adventure down to the Salton Sea with a few of his better friends .... we left pretty early, and after picking everyone up and a couple unscheduled stops we where off ... we made really good time getting out there, its too bad that we missed our exit and continued down the 10 freeway about 10 miles too far ... "hey isnt that the salton sea off to the left?" .... we flipped a bitch in the middle of the highway and went back ... soon enough we where having Del Taco at the last fast food chain till calexico.



roomate #2 Mike D and Annie in front of del. http://www.michaeldionne.com/



yeah. This is the Salton Sea. It is AMAZING. If you havn't been, you need to.



group photo number 1.



this was mostly set up ....



this wasnt ...



This is Bombay Beach. I have photographed this guy over the last few years .... and its slowly decaying back into the earth ...

Google bombay beach and you will find about 20 different photos of it. My favorite is one back in 2000 after some rains when it was still covered with metal ... i couldnt find it online ... though it is out there .... probably here ... www.kimstringfelllow.com

and now Ive got to leave on another photo adventure ... I am photographing a chunk of the santa ana river today ... .ill finish this later.

I went out to the Salton Sea on sunday with friends, it was a lot of fun, took a lot of cool pictures that I will be posting soon. Tonight I am photographing another burlesque show :)

I got a new job! A real one ... printing at a company near me, full time, 9 - 5. It is sweet. Less time for photography, but it pays more ;) Anyways. I have a few photographic goals for the new year.

Last year I photographed 40 shows, I will be happy with 24 this year (same goal as last year) I want to do at least a dozen commericial shoots for my portfolio. I need to get into gear on this one! Last year I only did 8 ...

I want to have my "leftovers" series printed professionally, and ready to show at a higher end gallery or whereever complete with artist statement and all. Right now its just printed on ink jet and cheap frames ... I was thinking 24x24 canvas?

I want to at least make progress printing "sunken City" this is going to be complicated and expensive. The prints are to be large, 5 or 6 feet by 2 or 3 feet. I would love to mount them to plex.

I want to FINISH my bookk A2. I should have it done by summer. I have 1st proof copy already made.

I want to shoot at least once for "Los Amigos". Its a pretty sketchy place to shoot, and I can't afford more than one ticket there a year ;)

and thats that. Well. there are more, but those are still in my head .... Oh.

So i went to Mika Miko's last show. Here are some images from it ...

I guess they have been a band since 2003, and the first time I saw them was in 2006 ... well ... it was the beggining of 2010 and its time for them to move on to other things, Mika Mikos last show (for now?) was at the smell on January 1st, they played the 30th, and 31st, I beleive all 3 days sold out. So how was the last show? Well. It was good. The damn band played for over an hour, played songs you have never heard before, played songs they play everytime, and played songs they havn't played in years. Balloons fell (sorta) confetti and sparkles rained everywhere, and sweat soaked kids where falling all over the place.













thats the (one of several) singer, she decided to jump into the crowd after the set ..

What was photographing this like? Well it was a freakin pain the ass, thats what it was like. Christ I need to actually get paid for this. Why can't these bands be rich or something? Or at least have big record companies paying people to take photographs? Ohhh yeah .... I probably wouldn't be interested in photographing them if they did ...

It wasn't so hard getting up to the front this time, I went up after the 3rd band finished, and surprisingly squeezed in easy enough. Once it started ... it got kinda interesting. Its way to easy to get carried away shooting digital with an 8 gig card, you can squeeze the shutter all day and not run out of memory, so I tried to take my time photographing, I mean hell, this was going to be an hour long set, may as well guess and wait for when stuff that isnt normal is going to start happening ... and it did ... it worked out pretty well. I switched between ambient and on camera flash, Mika Miko like to turn the lights off, so ambient wasnt working out so well, not to mention it was impossible to hold my camera steady enough to shoot without the flash, anything under 125th turned out blurry from everyone bumping into me, at some point I managed to move from the left side of the stage to the right side, which was a good move, I am happy I did. I wanted to take some photos from different spots, but there was no way in hell I was getting my spot back if I moved ... so I stayed put.

This show was awesome, and you missed it, thats too bad, maybe they will play again in a year or so? April 1st perhaps?