Saigon Punk Chronicles : Soi Dau Lang Warm up

Another chapter in the Chronicles. As the scene in Saigon keeps expanding, more venues are beginning to host punk and hardcore shows, and this was the first one at Le Cafe Des Stagiaires in District 2. With multiple floors, this venue is able to have a show on one floor while having a completely different vibe on the rooftop. Think open air laidback cocktail vibes....And then think about a DIY punk show blasting on the floor just beneath. Endlessly amusing to watch those different worlds collide. Definitely saw a few interesting looks as the suited, booted and cocktail dresses passed by kids losing their shit to breakdown after breakdown.

On the lineup were Under Pressure, Empathize, HappyCo, and Hypertension. A good mix of heavy metallic hardcore with some mathy finger tappin’ shenanigans alongside some more post hardcore vibes between the mix of bands. It’s nice to see styles start to branch out within the whole DIY scene here and it’s just going to get better and better. Big ups to Ethos Collective, stay tuned for some fun news on this whole scenario.

Saigon Punk Chronicles : Frank Turner, 7uppercuts & Papa Lam

Another chapter in the Chronicles and what a chapter it was. The fine folks at Loud Minority put together an absolute banger of a show. Frank Turner boarded a plane in London, got off of the plane, and played a show a few hours later… If you didn’t know this, you’d have been well impressed by his performance and the energy in the room. Knowing this, it’s ever more impressive… What an absolute professional road dog.

Callum from 7uppercuts started the night off with Skeleton Goode as his backing band with his solo stuff under the name Papa Lam. Really looking forward to see how this progresses, fun stuff in kind of the same vein as Turner. 7uppercuts then got on stage and ripped it up setting up for an absolute barn burner from Frank Turner. The fact that a guy can get up on stage with an acoustic guitar and have people lose their minds like I was watching Bad Brains is quite honestly mind boggling. Can’t give this man enough credit. He played one crowd favourite after the next and ended things with Skeleton Goode coming back on stage as his backing band. As I watched from the balcony, it felt like I had stepped back in time and was watching one of the great punk shows of my youth. This type of energy in a room isn’t the norm so being able to see it in Saigon was pretty special.

For the photographers, these were shot on my Sony kit with a 28mm prime lens that I’ve not used in ages. Normally I’ll use a 18mm for these type of shows and get up close and personal, but opted for a bit of a different feel for this. Allowed for a nice little happy medium in this venue.

Papa Lam

7uppercuts

Saigon Punk Chronicles: The Metal Edition

Not really a hardcore or punk show per se, but this show still had a lot of overlap in the crowd. The bill consisted of Orca from the Philippines, Diarsia off their brand new release, Method, Obsess, and the Korean shred machine Oathean. I grabbed the Fuji x100v and an old speedlight and rolled the dice. These shows give me a chance to experiment with different set ups - multiple cameras, light set ups, techniques…No pressure if I shit the bed and they turn out awful, but at least I learned something, right?. That said, I don’t think I’ve run into any insurmountable challenges, and different tools yield different results. I wanted to shoot a bit more abstract images to bridge over from the usual dragged shutter and speedlight combo and I think they turned out interesting. Tried a bit of multiple exposure shenanigans. Essentially played around and threw everything at the wall to see what stuck. Maybe a bit artsy even..

Saigon Punk Chronicles : Aftershock

This past Sunday I headed out to a show and to see some old friends I hadn’t caught up with in a while. The bill consisted of HSA, Song Am, Katto Katto, District 105, Cut Lon, and Luan Quan Collective. A mixed bag of genres and I wasn’t familiar with all the bands, but I knew there’d be some thrashy goodness with Cut Lon and of course the homies in D105. I didn’t get images of everyone, but I decided to shoot this a bit differently than what I’ve been shooting this project and brought my studio lights in much like I did back in the day in the States. It’s going to take some tweaking, but here we are and it’s nice to get a different look. I’m not going to divide the images up into bands this time around but rather an overall vibe of the show.

On a side note, I tried to mosh last night and father time quickly put me in my place and now I’m limping around like geriatric. Lesson learned. Stay in my lane. Press the shutter. Stay out of the way of the kids. This is a game for the youngins’. Until next time, here are the images from last night.

The Week in Photos: Volume 5

We’ve wrapped up a few commercial projects and had a few days before preproduction started on a couple of others, so I wanted to go out and shoot some images for myself a few days this week. Technically some of these are from the week before, so this is the week(ish) in photos. I’ll get better about the scheduling of this whole thing, but it’s been hectic lately so this will have to do until I get it together on the schedule.

Looking at what I’ve shot recently, I’ve noticed how I’ve gradually been shooting more and more at night. I think this probably has to do with a smaller camera that I can take with me on social outings and snap some images along the way, but also I think I’ve just become more and more intrigued with how pools of light and their contrasting shadow makes for such dramatic moody images. If you’ve been to Saigon, you’ll know how frenetic it is and how there’s never any shortage of energy when you’re walking around the city. Similarly, its easy to have very busy compositions and I’m a minimalist at heart. Using shadows to hide distractions and isolate my subjects is always going to be my first approach. So here’s the last week and a half in photos.

The Week in Photos: Volume 4..... a bit delayed

I started this whole series of The Week in Photos to keep the creative juices flowing and partially because I have this little camera that I can take everywhere with me and it’s just so fun to shoot with. I debated on whether or not to mix in travel images and maybe some of my actual work, but that seems a little messy and my sense of order wouldn’t let me go down that road. So maybe I should rename this “The week in photos when I’m not working or on the road or have a million other obligations”……probably not. But in any event, I had these photos from right before I headed out on the road and forgot that they were even on the hard drive until I started importing some random images from this past week. These are from around a month ago. So here’s The Week in Photos. From last month.

The Week in Photos: Vol.3 - Rainy Season's Arrival

It looks like rainy season has decided to make an entrance. Cue thunderstorms, unexpected downpours, and slight inconveniences in travel - read ridiculous traffic. While most lament the rain, photographically I’m loving it. The light right after a storm, drama in the skies, reflections… its a new season and it’s nice to have something different to photograph. While I don’t have the seasonal changes like I did in my upbringing, I love having the demarkation of time through different weather. I’ll take what I can get. No waxing on poetically this week, just the images of the week. Complete with the obligatory reflection shots, and they ain’t stopping any time soon…so get used to it until the rains cease in around 6 months. There are some randoms from the day to day sprinkled in as well for good measure.

Most of these were taken on the Fuji x100v, but I snuck in a couple from my Sony kit too. Can you tell which ones they are? Put your guesses in the comments! Also, everything edited in Capture One or is straight out of the camera with most of the Fuji shots.

The Week in Photos: Vol. 2

Busy with commercial work this week, I’ve not had too much time to come up for air. That said, in the downtimes, I’ve made an effort to find some time for myself at least once a day to disengage and walk around so I can keep a clear headspace. Even if I’m not managing to make it far, I’m trying to see things I’ve seen countless times with new eyes. Shoot places multiple times in different light, different parts of the day, different angles… dig a little deeper and slow down a little more to really look at things rather than merely strolling by. Finding beauty in the mundane.

The older I get, the more I feel like boredom is more and more my own fault. Focusing on the details around me and paying more attention by slowing down, I find beauty and interest in what I’ve glossed over a million times. When I first moved overseas, like many, I went through an existential crisis and had to make sense of this new reality I had chosen for myself. I wasn’t really all that happy and I couldn’t figure out what the deal was… I was living on a tropical island, I was chasing my passion of becoming a photographer, life was relatively good… on paper. What was I to be unhappy about?? But, I was often bored, I wasn’t inspired, motivation was fleeting. Something was missing. I was always thinking about what was next and it was kind of a grass is always greener type situation. Nothing was good enough. One afternoon I was complaining to a friend of mine and he casually said, “you alone are responsible for your own happiness” Cue the record skipping as I tried to make sense of this short and to the point sentiment. I’m not sure if he was saying it off the cuff, or was repeating his own personal opinion, but it’s stuck with me after all these years. That phrase can be interpreted in myriad ways, and I think about this mindset in varying ways when it comes to the different areas of my life. But as it pertains to the day to day, I often look back on this encounter and realise there are rarely times that boredom is inevitable, but rather it’s my perspective that isn’t right. Maybe I’ve needed to step back, or forward, or maybe sideways, to look at things in new light (pun intended). Maybe I needed to choose to see the beauty and appreciate my immediate surroundings. To take note of the present, appreciate the moment in time, notice my breath, feel the wind move, listen to the bugs… and more often than not, for me at least, take pictures of the little things that make up my life.

I realise I’ve written about this sentiment in the past, but I think its important to reflect back. On work, on life, on the little and the big things. In the past, while I’ve more or less felt this way in general, the execution or following through with it was often forced rather than a part of an every day routine. I’d have to remind myself to do these things and it was often after weeks of grinding out job after job and it was the eject cord to keep myself from burning out. I’d get my fix and then right back into it…and the cycle repeated…work work work, realise things were going pear shaped, stop and smell the roses, love life, and then right back into the fire… It took me far too long to understand that it wasn’t a “thing to do” to keep from burning out, but rather a way of looking at the world in general that maintains balance. Instead of always looking forward to the next big thing, finding these moments of beauty every day is tantamount to having smooth seas rather than trying to right the ship in the midst of a shit storm.

Okay, enough of all that. These were the moments, downtimes, and photographic evidence that have nothing to do with my work. Just happy snaps from the day to day.