Portra 400

This second roll took place across a wide period. The top section of the Blanton was all taken back at the end of last year but I just never got the rest of the roll shot. While there are some cool pictures there, overall I don’t want to focus on those.

That said, I do want to give a bit of attention to that very first picture in the top left. One thing that’s true about me is that I don’t really like spending a lot of time in the older European art sections of art museums. However, on this day I did a quick walkthrough and wanted to take this picture. I appreciate the layering in the composition and would like to do more of this kind of picture in the future when the environment allows. I’ll talk more about it if it happens.

In terms of SXSW, this roll covered Wednesday, March 15th and the first two shows of March 16th. The first show was Ava Vegas who I covered in an earlier post. In that post I did promise to point out my personal favorite picture of her that I took. Honestly, I like both of the other large pictures here. But my favorite would be the vertical one with SOTOL off to the left. I really like the pose and the organization of the picture. To the left is SOTOL, Ava Vegas is in the center, and her sign comes off the right edge. To the top is that pretty chandelier and overall I feel like it has the right balance of space and subjects.

Next was the purple/pink pictures to the left of Anna Salman. These were taken at Stephen F’s Bar. Overall, I wasn’t super enthused or excited by the music nor the pictures. Going into it, I thought that she’d sing in Pakistani as a Pakistani American who has a chunk of her discography in Pakistani. However, it was all in English and while it wasn’t bad necessarily, it was a bit bland and uninspired in my opinion. That also goes into the pictures and overall it was my least favorite set of SXSW. No shade to her, just not my favorite.

After that show I went over to The Iron Bear to see SINE, an Austin based electronic artist. As you might be able to tell, Curse Mackey had a cameo on stage and I really wish I had done a better job with the focus. Overall it was a pretty cool show even if the venue could’ve been darker to really create stronger contrasting lighting. Though SINE and Curse Mackey’s music is similar in some ways and there’s a clear influence of the other in each other’s music, they’re both still really distinct. I’d say that Curse Mackey leans a bit more into the noisy and industrial space and SINE has a more melodic and slightly more ethereal feel. A big part of that is her voice and singing. Honestly, if you took Curse Mackey and Pastel Ghost and put them together, I think you might end up with something kinda like SINE. SINE’s definitely harder and more industrial than Pastel Ghost, but the vocality and how it interacts is similar.

Anyways, I really feel like these pictures did a disservice to her show and I’d love to get another shot at it. I think a different venue like Elysium would work better too. Somewhere that can and will get darker would benefit the show.

After SINE I went to go see the Italian artist Giungla at Wax Myrtle’s, the same venue as Fuse on the first night. And man, I really wish this turned out better. I enjoyed the show overall. Her music is strong and her performance was reasonably animated. But the venue and lighting just didn’t work. It was too dark and the volume was not working for the show. Not the worst mixing of the festival, but ultimately just disappointing. Because of the limitations of the lighting on stage pretty much just being towards the back, it was really hard to get good pictures of her. If I were able to take it even 1 stop faster, but ideally 2, I would’ve really liked how that hair flip picture turned out. As is, it’s not bad. But it smears too much and it needs the shutter to be just that little bit faster. I ended my night there even though it was pretty early and I could’ve seen two more shows because I was exhausted.

To start the next night I saw Kaitlyn Raitz, a Nashville based cellist. The show was great, even if the neighboring venue was blasting into Esther’s Follies where this show was. I grew up playing cello and I always want to support cellists. Because of how the venue was set up I didn’t really want to move up to take a picture during the majority of the show so I ended up taking a throwaway pretty much at the end of her set. The picture is sandwiched between Giungla in the bottom left, Anna Salman, and SINE to the right.

To finish off this roll is Curse Mackey who I mentioned in a previous post. All of these pictures are pretty much trying to do similar things. They work or don’t in varying degrees and I once again wish I were shooting this roll just a single stop faster (1600 ISO equivalent instead of 800).

Anyways, that’s it for this roll, two more to go before a wrap up of SXSW post.