Andy Gapin

I went to see Night Birds last night in Philly. It was a good time. I took some photos.

These are a week and a half old, but I’m finally getting around to posting these photos from Shellac’s show at Union Transfer in Philly. The show was awesome, the venue is brand new and pretty cool.

Alright, so it’s been a little while since I’ve blogged. Oops. It’s probably going to be slow for the next month as well while final wedding stuff is coming together. Sorry about that, but I haven’t abandoned this thing, I promise!

Last weekend, I took a trip down to Baltimore for Insubordination Fest. This was my third time at the fest and it was probably the most fun year I’ve attended. There were no venue issues like last year. In fact, the venue, The Ottobar, couldn’t have been better for the weekend. I couldn’t come up with a complaint if I tried.

One of the highlights of the weekend was actually a joke band that was put together solely for the sake of the fest. And amazingly, the songs that were recorded a few days before the fest are actually better than most real bands’ stuff. Their set was a ton of fun.

But, that being said, the hands down best set of the weekend was from The Copyrights. So damn good. If you’re not already listening to this band, you should be.

I got myself into a little trouble with continuous mode on my camera though. I came home with almost 1400 photos from less 36 hours. Insane. I narrowed down to about 200 to edit and I narrowed down further to about 70 to post.

Enjoy.

Alright, so 90s indie-rock band Archers of Loaf is currently in the middle of a reunion tour. These things can really be hit or miss, but I figured that I’d give it a try since I’ve never seen them before. I’m not going to do a full review of the show, but for a bunch of guys in their 40s (?), they had an insane amount of energy. They really brought the show. They played everything I wanted to hear and played it well. They were tight and awesome. I was genuinely surprised and impressed. The only thing I could have done without would have been the two encores. Seriously, society as a whole needs to come together to abolish the concept of planned encores.

I’ve never been to the Music Hall of Williamsburg before, but it was very nice. We got there early and snagged a couple seats in the balcony and stayed there all night. It was a great spot to watch from, but combined with the ultra-low lighting, it was not a great spot to take photos from.

Here’s what I got.

Last Friday, I took a ride up to Brooklyn for the first night of the Don Giovanni Records showcase at Death By Audio. The lineup was The Steinways, The Measure [SA], Black Wine, Full of Fancy, and Big Eyes and except for the disaster that was The Steinways’ set, the show was awesome.

I was able to photograph three of the bands, but of course the lighting was awful and I didn’t bring my flash. I had to bump the ISO all the way up to 3200 to get non-blurry shots, but they turned out to be pretty damn noisy. But since I knew this would be the case going in, I didn’t worry about it too much and just had fun with it.

I ended up having to convert most of the photos to black and white to deal with the different colored lights, but I did decide to keep the color for a few to see what I could salvage.

Honestly, I kind of enjoyed some of the results.

I’m not going to go too much into depth about last night’s Lawrence Arms show at the North Star Bar in Philly, but it was awesome. As with the other four or five times I’ve seen them, they tore through an awesome set that only left something to be desired because the band has too many great songs to fit into a single night.

As usual, Brendan was solidly drunk and had plenty of banter to go around, but about a third of it was slurred and completely unintelligible. Chris was quiet, kind of looked like he could barely stay awake, and his voice sounded a bit off. I couldn’t see much of Neil, but as a whole, the band was on.

I brought my camera, but the North Star Bar is pretty dark inside and I didn’t really have a good spot to take shots from so I kept the camera in my bag until the last few songs. I fired off a bunch of shots towards the end, but I wasn’t really in the position to get anything too spectacular. That and I was too busy enjoying the show to really worry about it, so here are a few photos that all look the same.

Over the weekend, I went to Insubordination Fest down in Baltimore for the second year in a row. It was a really good time, despite having a cold, but I won’t get into a lot of specifics, just a few highlights, I guess.

The Smoking Popes kind of sucked. I would have been disappointed if I was actually expecting more, but even though I’ve always been a fan, I just haven’t really been that into their reunion. They completely ruined “Pretty Pathetic” and a couple of other songs by dragging them out way too much. It was awful, actually.

But Tenement, Dear Landlord, The Copyrights, The Leftovers, Dead Mechanical, and the Dopamines were all super good. The biggest surprise though was Less Than Jake. We didn’t want to pay for a second night for the hotel room, so our plan was to drive back Saturday night and since LTJ didn’t go on until 12:15, we couldn’t stay for much of their set. We watched about a half hour and watched them rock a bunch of stuff from Losing Streak. This was really great. Hearing them play those songs instantly brought me back ten years. So much fun.

This fest was also my first attempt at any kind of band photography. It was mostly a failure. Out of almost 300 pictures, I only liked a handful of them. The two main issues I had were lighting and getting a good spot. Since I’m a short dude, I pretty much need to be in the front, but I’m past the point in my life where I want to push and squeeze past people to get up front. Being in the front also comes with the risk of your camera getting damaged if the crowd is moving a lot and pushing forward…or if there are a lot of stage divers. Not good. As for the lighting, I felt like the venue that hosted the show has worse lighting to work with than most venues, but it should have been workable. The issue is just that with the low-level of lighting, I really had to crank up the ISO to be able to shoot with a fast enough shutter speed even with my 50mm 1.8 wide open. I ended up with a lot of noise in a lot of pics. But even with the ISO up to 1600, my pictures all came out really dark. I was able to successfully use the flash for some shots, but for many, it killed the entire mood of picture. I don’t want to make excuses for my lack of skill and experience, but I definitely think there was little I could do without a bigger flash that I could aim at the ceiling to bounce the light. Oh well.

Here are the pictures I actually consider “useable.”