If you do a quick Google search on Thievery Corporation at the 930 Club, you're sure to find plenty of reviews from professional publications and local blogs. I threw my hat into that ring two weeks ago when I posted a quick summary of the Thursday night performance at the venerable DC music venue. I didn't go into the bloody details about the show because everyone and their brother would. But I did want to take you back to that 5-night stop in the District because I had a rare experience with Thievery that I'd like to share.
As a nightlife photographer, I'm used to being close to some of the world's best DJs. Getting a shot right next to the artist is the basis of my art-form. Throughout the process, you learn to operate like a ghost-sneaking in for your shots and then moving the heck outta the way. So after shooting photos of Thievery's Thursday night show from the press pit at the front of the stage, I contacted their publicist about going back for something better. I showed them some photos from past nightlife shoots and asked if I could be granted access to shoot both Rob Garza and Eric Hilton in the DJ booth. Access was granted.
You see, the problem with shooting a concert like this is you can't use a flash. I'm sure you could try, but you'd be moved out of the photo pit quicker than it takes to snap your shutter. That makes it pretty tough trying to capture quality shots of the two stars of the Thievery show, who are perched up behind a wall of lights manning the turn tables. You can capture some sweet silhouette shots, but the range of light and lens are limited. I knew shooting from backstage would provide me with a better angle to capture Rob and Eric and allow me to bring the fans even closer to the names behind the band.
I wish I could say my problems were solved that easily. Shooting backstage was amazing. But damn if I didn't need that flash. I spent the first few songs at the front of the stage capturing shots I remembered would be good from the first show I attended. I should add that the photo pit had been expanded because Thievery was shooting their tour DVD that night. This required a very tall man with a very large HD camera to move himself from one end of the stage to the next. The pit was wide, but we had to keep one eye in the view-finder and the other looking out for the film crew. That was interesting!
It was around the 3rd or 4th song I moved backstage to capture some shots I rarely see of Thievery. I'm told I was like a Whac-A-Mole in the DJ booth, popping up for a shot and disappearing just like that. I spent a bit more time near Eric because he was in front of the tradition DJ gear I'm used to shooting. Rob however moved from turn tables to a keyboard, which did offer me something different from my typical nightlife perspective. I probably spent a grand total of 2.5 songs in the booth with Eric and Rob because I never want to seem like I'm taking advantage of my position.
The rest of the time I simply looked for shots that were unique to the Thievery show. The bassist sitting on the floor having a spiritual experience was one. Guitarist Rob Myers expressing all of his emotions through his pick was another. These things along with the experience of being on stage with artists of this level made for an unbelievable experience. I'm honored to have been granted that access and delighted to be able to share those sights with you through this blog and the complete photo gallery on Dougvansant.com.
Up until this point, I've been feeding the Urban Marinade experience with photos from my own collection and photos I find through search. But part of my mission with this blog is to expose the reader to high-quality nightlife and high-quality nightlife photography. And from what I've seen online, there are a ton of great photographers out there.
So... to accomplish this, I created a Flickr group called Urban Marinade DC. My hope is that other nightlife photographers will upload their images and add them to this group so we can feed the blog with your images. If all goes well, I'll run a weekly feature highlighting some of the photographers who uploaded images to the group, in hopes of giving them some exposure as well.
So if you enjoy photography, nightlife, and urban settings, please feel free to join the Flickr group and/or upload your images as often as you'd like.
The weekend before Christmas is usually a time of last-minute shopping, packing for travel and holiday parties. But plans were changed in 2009 as a winter storm dumped roughly 16 inches of snow on the District. Some areas of Virginia saw as much as 26 inches. Instead of buying last-minute gifts, people were in a mad rush buying toilet paper and milk. It was a little crazy.
Since I'm lacking in the snow apparel department, I didn't wander too far away from my house during the height of the storm. But I was able to capture some neat shots in the Capitol Hill and Navy Yard neighborhoods of DC. Enjoy...
Since I've been sick much of the weekend, I decided to take some time today to go through my old photo archives and see what could be posted and what could be discarded. Needless to say, my 2006 folder left very little worth keeping that wasn't already on my site. But I did find this folder called Punta Gorda that caught my eye. The folder contained photos that were taken by myself in the small Florida gulf coast town of Punta Gorda. The images you see here were taken about two weeks after Hurricane Charlie had ripped through the town and literally flattened it. I was living in Tampa at the time and was on my way home from Miami. I knew there had been devastating destruction and wanted to see it first hand.
Now you have to understand something about me...I grew up in Delaware and had been through many hurricanes. I remember a time vacationing with my family in St. Michaels, Maryland and sitting in a hot tub outside as a hurricane swept through the area. I figured I knew hurricanes and knew what to expect. When I moved to Tampa, everyone in my office talked about our amazing hurricane coverage and how engaged the entire newsroom would become. When Hurricane Charlie turned north, crossing Cuba and heading into the Gulf of Mexico, it began. Our newsroom went into 24-hour operation mode. We had daily updates, path projections and wind speeds. Charlie was heading right at Tampa. I lived in St. Pete, two blocks from Tampa Bay, so my neighborhood was under a forced evacuation. I put everything in my house up on the second floor, raised the furniture on blocks and boarded up the windows. I packed my bag and went into the office for what became 48 hours of basically living in the newsroom.
Again, I figured I knew what to expect. I've been there, done that! But I remember the ominous statement from our anchor around 8 a.m. the day Charlie was supposed to make landfall. The hurricane was still heading directly at Tampa and the anchor says "it looks like our worst fears could come true here in the Tampa Bay region." I remember I needed to go take a nap since I had been up all night but suddenly felt uneasy. It was that moment I realized this wasn't a joke. And it certainly wasn't the same type of hurricane I had been through in Delaware or Maryland.
Hurricane Charlie was a category 5 monster. It wasn't very large around and was moving quickly, but it packed winds in excess of 155 mph and a destructive storm surge. The idea of a hurricane of that force hitting Tampa would be apocalyptic for a city of it's size. It was, quite literally, our worst fears.
I remember waking up from my nap about 4 hours later and coming down to our newsroom. I remember thinking the wind outside would surely have woken me up, but it had not. I remember seeing our anchors looking at a hurricane path that looked different than the one we had been watching up until then. Instead of it taking Charlie up into Tampa Bay, it had now shifted in-land towards Orlando. Hurricane Charlie had turned right about 100 miles south of Tampa, right smack into Punta Gorda.
I went through 4 hurricanes that year. I packed up and evacuated more times than I had moved in the last 6 years. I spent most of August and September with plywood on my windows because we got sick of taking down the wood only to have another Cat 5 storm heading our way. After Charlie, Ivan, Jean and Francis all made landfall in Florida. To many residents of the sunshine state, it was the summer of hell.
Hurricane Jean struck my home in St. Pete and left me with a flooded house, no power or water and basically homeless for 2 weeks. I survived. Most of us did. We even joked about it that winter. Soon we wore t-shirts parodying the Master Card commercials with slogans like "Surviving hurricanes in paradise, priceless!"
Not long after I left Tampa for Oakland, CA, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast. We all remember that one! It was one of the most publicized, tragic and costly natural disasters in American history. But I took away a different feeling on Katrina than most did. I, like most of my former colleagues in Tampa, remembered what it was like. I remembered what I saw in Punta Gorda. The rest of the country had forgotten about these Florida cities that were completely flattened. Heck, most still claim Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. It didn't. Ground zero for Katrina was Biloxi, Mississippi. There was nothing left of that town. Most neighborhoods had been reduced to foundations. Some foundations were even gone. New Orleans was a disaster. Biloxi was simply...gone. Wiped off the map in one day.
I remember all of the anger directed at our President, FEMA and the DHS after Katrina. And yet I recall directing my anger at the Mayor of New Orleans, the governor of the state and their local population. You see, having gone through 4 disastrous hurricanes back to back, I knew the details of evacuations, first responders and hurricane preparedness. We listened to it for 24-hours a day for almost two months the previous year. Bush, FEMA, DHS... they followed standard protocol. They did the same thing with Katrina they had done with Charlie, Jean, Ivan and Francis. You didn't see the same problems in Florida the previous year that you saw with Katrina. Hell, you didn't see the same problems in Mississippi that you saw in Louisiana.
The fact is this, the city of New Orleans was failed by it's leadership. It was failed by the very people the residents elected to protect and manage that city. Look at these photos. The people of Punta Gorda lost everything. But the majority of them survived and went on to rebuild. And they did so because of the leadership in their city, in their county and in their state capital.
I'll never forget that day driving through Punta Gorda. It changed my whole perception on hurricanes and the power of nature. It made me realize - when my house was hit, flooded and lost all utilities for a few weeks - that I was lucky to still have a roof and be alive. I never complained again about evacuations and all the mind-numbing talk about hurricane preparedness.
Some will still disagree with me about this post. I've wanted to write something like this for about 4 years now. I sat there in that Oakland newsroom and let my personal experiences stay silent while all of inexperienced Californians raged on about who was right and who was wrong. Armchair quarterbacks were on every channel. But in my silence, I never forgot Punta Gorda, FL. Or Pensacola, FL. Or Gulf Shores, AL. Or Port Saint Lucie, FL. Or Biloxi...
On Wednesday, July 29th, I returned to Los Angeles, one of my favorite cities in the United States. I've had many people ask me why is this one of my favorite destinations? Surely the cough inducing smog, cluttered freeways and endless miles of sprawl would turn anyone off. But that's not the LA I see. It's not the LA that I fell in love with on my first visit and continued my love-affair with this time around. You see, to me LA is a combination of everything I want in a city.
As you'll see in these photos I shot, LA is photogenic. It's a city that has it all. It has an amazing skyline with fabulous architecture, historic buildings, art-deco influences and modern impulses. It's a city that has grit and glamour. It has walkable neighborhoods with cute boutiques, wonderful coffee shops, and awesome restaurants only natives know about. It has energy, excitement and a spice of chill with the nearby beaches. It's warm. It has palm trees. And the population is made of up virtually any walk of life you could imagine. Trash, sprawl, traffic...they go hand-in-hand with any major city. But try finding the same type of glamorous sun-drenched energy of Hollywood on the streets of Chicago.
But the other reason I'm drawn to LA is for Camp Hollywood and the amazing dancing found in this part of the country. Last year I came to Camp Hollywood only knowing what I saw in pictures and YouTube clips. This year I returned knowing exactly what the event was all about and why I enjoy it so much. We spent 5 days in the California sun enjoying the city, shopping, eating great food, relaxing at the pool and then dancing the night away, sometimes until sunrise.
This year I competed in the Amateur Strictly Lindy and the Amateur Jack and Jill competition. The strictly was a completely last minute decision with my good friend Lora Abe from Las Vegas. We didn't expect to make finals or place because we hadn't danced together in almost a year. But we had so much fun getting out there and winging it just for the hell of it. The Jack and Jill however, was something I had looked forward to since placing 10th last year. After some pretty stiff competition, I ended up placing 5th. On one hand you want to win these things. But on the other hand, I'm honored to have placed at a competition that hosts so many amazing dancers.
I think the highlight of the weekend for me was the Underground Jitterbug Championships. The UJC was started last year by Nick Peterson of Las Vegas and was a huge success because of the no holds barred approach to dancing and air steps. It's an unsanctioned jam format competition that starts at 2 a.m. and is literally anything goes. You'll see kips, waterfalls, pancakes and even people doing the worm. If you can get the crowd fired up, you move on. Lora and I considered entering and just throwing whatever aerials we knew. But starting a comp at 2:30 a.m. has us rethinking the idea and so we figured it was better to just watch and enjoy. The final two couples ended up being Tiffany Wine and Kenny Nelson from Denver matched up against Dax Hock and Max Pitruzzella. It was a full scale battle on the dance floor with Tiffany and Kenny getting the victory. I personally enjoyed seeing Dax toss Max in a lamp post and pancake, but you gotta hand it to those Denver folks throwing tricks right up until the final measure of music. The video is below...
Overall LA and Camp Hollywood was exactly what I expected it to be. It was great dancing, great people and a great city wrapped up into a mini-vacation. Stay tuned for my full Los Angeles photo gallery to be produced sometime in the next week...
I figured it was time to post some photos from a shoot with Swedish house music DJ John Dahlback. This is now the third year in a row that I've found myself shooting photos of a DJ the Thursday before a July 4th weekend. I think this year was the best so far because of the range of images I was able to capture along the way.
We started our evening on the terrace where I was able to catch some amazing shots of the club and the lasers permeating the crowd of house heads below. I also captured some shots of my friends who were happy to give their best Zoolander face and pose for some provocative silhouette shots throughout the club. Having friends who are models is so rad!
So the part of the evening I enjoyed most was finding the ability to shoot some of these shots with such a low ISO setting. ISO settings for non-photo geeks measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The lower the number the less sensitive your camera is to light and the finer the grain. Higher ISO settings are generally used in darker situations to get faster shutter speeds (for example an indoor sports event when you want to freeze the action in lower light) - however the cost is noisier shots. You can see this in some of my previous photo galleries where either the lighting was poor or the DJ bounced all over the place and I needed to speed up my shutter to keep my subject from blurring across the shot.
By shooting with a higher sensitivity, my shots of John Dahlback came out much crisper than normal. This was specially satisfying knowing I can print these shots in a much larger format now because the grain was kept to a minimum. It also doesn't hurt that the lighting in the Ultra Bar DJ booth is brimming in blue illumination.
The following are a few more shots from the evening. The complete gallery can be seen right here on dougvansant.com. Enjoy...
Obama to Sarkozy: "Kinda hard to blame Berlusconi when they look like that." Sarkozy back to Obama: "Uh huh...see what I'm saying!"
U.S. President Barack Obama (C) and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy (R) take their places with junior G8 delegates for a family photo at the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, July 9, 2009. Leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial nations and the main developing economies are meeting in the central Italian city of L'Aquila until Friday to discuss issues ranging from global economic stimulus to climate change and oil prices.
But clearly Obama and Sarkozy are thinking of a different type of stimulus in this photo...
I found myself reflecting the other day on a ton of things that have changed in my life over the past two-plus years I've lived here in DC. I moved across country, got separated, lived with rednecks, started dancing, moved into the city, got divorced, traveled a ton, moved again, and made more friends than I could have ever asked for. In a nutshell, the past two-plus years has been some of the best and worst in my life.
When I moved to DC, there was so much uncertainty in my life. My marriage was on the rocks and I didn't really know where it would go. I had just started dancing but still sucked and really didn't care to social dance while feeling like a swing dance reject. Even my job was on contract and wasn't going to last more than three months. The only thing consistent in my life was my photography and my friends...of which two of my closest (Dan and Matt) lived right here. I rented a room in a small townhouse in Annandale because it was close to my contract work and because I still had an apartment in Oakland. My first roommates were awesome and a joy to live with, but they moved out 3 months later and I was left with an empty townhouse and two other redneck roommates who had their friends get drunk and pass out on the empty living room floor. Life kinda sucked at that point and I missed the days of tearing up the town in Tampa with my crew at some of the hottest clubs in one of my favorite cities. That was when I had to make some hard choices and make a change...
Fast forward one year from that. I had moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Connecticut Ave. I had all brand-new furniture, a new LCD TV, new Macbook Pro, and a new car. I had fully immersed myself into Lindy Hop, started traveling to dance events in other cities and had even thrown myself into a competition. I was back with my soon-to-be-ex-wife, had really gotten into exploring and living in DC and even found some friends who enjoyed house and trance music as much as I did. Life was good.
Fast forward to today... The marriage didn't last. And I'm not sad about that. We both grew apart and had different priorities in life. We remained friends after the divorce and even still dance together on occasion. I certainly don't wish a divorce on anyone, but it was probably the best thing to happen to me since that move across country. I now live in a new apartment in downtown. I teach dance, travel extensively and compete on a regular basis. I shoot photos for some of the best clubs in the world and have a resume that includes photo shoots of 5 of the top 10 DJs in the world. I've shot photos in LA, Boston, Chicago, New York, Austin, SF and many other cities. I work for the AARP, the largest lobbying organization and one of the most powerful in Washington, DC. And later this summer I'm moving into a brand-new apartment right next to the ballpark. Dan and Matt still live in the city and even more of my friends are moving to town this summer.
It's crazy to think that in that short period of time I've changed so much. But it happens. When people come to a crossroad in their life, they can keep going down that one road or they can make a sharp turn. I made that sharp turn several months after I arrived in DC and I couldn't be happier with the journey.
The photo above of Lily and I was taken recently in NYC in the meatpacking district. We were trying different things to create an image to promote our teaching and weekly dance, Tempo at Muse Lounge.
Welcome to urban marinade...a blog that lets you stew in the cultural crock pot of Washington, DC. I'm here to rant and rave about anything and everything in my little urban world. Generally speaking, that includes nightlife, photography, dancing and DC urban development. So there!
If you do a quick Google search on Thievery Corporation at the 930 Club, you're sure to find plenty of reviews from professional publications and local blogs. I threw my hat into that ring two weeks ago when I posted a quick summary of the Thursday night performance at the venerable DC music venue. I didn't go into the bloody details about the show because everyone and their brother would. But I did want to take you back to that 5-night stop in the District because I had a rare experience with Thievery that I'd like to share.
