Way back in January, which seems like ten years ago, I got to shoot Jolene Jolene again. She is an awesome model and she has an amazing apartment. Last time I got to shoot Jolene in her crazy living room and this time we went upstairs to her hallway or whatever it is that separates her bathroom from her bedroom and kitchen. She has this crazy loft and every wall is like another scene. I love the 60′s wicker chair because of my love of late 60′s/ early 70′s militant black iconography and you cannot beat the Free Huey shot as far as that shit goes. On the other side of the room the naked dude lamp is fucking amazing and the American flag that blocks the entrance to her room looks great in the background. Her place is a photographers dream and as you might notice she looks pretty fucking rad naked.

Obviously you need to see more, so click here now to see a bunch of naked photos of the stunning Jolene Jolene!

Last time I shot Phoenix Askani we didn’t get too many shots I loved but I had an amazing night. I was in the LA and I hung out with a bunch of New Yorkers watching the Lakers win the NBA title in the Roosevelt Hotel. After that I shot Phoenix and we went to an amazing party at the pool downstairs. It really was a great night.  This time when I shot Phoenix I didn’t have a great day and I ended up sitting in my rental car for like two hours because I couldn’t find anything to do to kill time before whatever I was doing next. But this time we got some awesome shots.

I edited these pictures last night when I was drunk. I rarely drink but my band played last night so I had to get drunk so throwing myself off stage and into strangers would hurt less. I have no idea what this edit looks like but I remember Tweeting last night about how surprised Phoenix looks in a lot of these shots. I also remember that a lot of these shots are awesome. They are NSFW of course and you can see A LOT more of Phoenix on Burning Angel if you like.

Click here to see the full uncensored gallery of Phoenix Askani.

Way too long ago my tattoo artist Betty Rose through a party for her eight year anniversary at working at Red Rocket Tattoo. I had just received my new camera in the mail and she has a bunch of cute tattooed babe friends so I met them down at the jazz club Fat Cats for jazz and ping pong. After that we all headed over to B Side for my friend Shain’s going away party and fooseball. At the end of the night I ended up in a bathroom to take photos of two girls making out topless just like old times. A few days later Betty Rose hooked me up with some cheap tattoos which are not quite finished yet but will be soon. Good times.

Click here for the reasonably NSFW photos from Betty Rose’s anniversary party and Fat Shain’s going away party.

On Friday Alexander Heir had an art show at Mishka’s 350 Broadway store called Visions of Death. I live a few blocks from the store and came by for a bit to check it out. I ended up leaving with a print from the show. It will be up for a while so you should go in there and check it out.

Anyway, my friend Kimberly Kane (seen below) has been in town visiting me and I have been too busy hanging out with her to actually do any real work, so sorry about that. I am gonna make this quick because I really needed to get something up, bu I will get back to work for real tomorrow. I have some fun stuff coming this week.

Click here to see all the photos from Alexander Heir’s Visions of Death at Mishka’s 350 Broadway flagship.

On Monday Roxy Cottontail had me come out to her new weekly party Mondaze at WIP.  Nicky Da B and Zebra Katz performed and Rusty Lazer, DJ Wonder and DJ Fresh Direct all DJ’d. I got a chance to play with my new camera and I even shot some video that you will probably never see. I still don’t have the hang of the new camera yet, but I got some decent shots. The party was a good time but I am going to make this write up really short because I wrote it once and my site decided it would be funny to delete it for no reason. So yeah, that happened.

Click here to see all the pictures from Mondaze at WIP.

Shay Laren is one of my new favorite models and I am sure if you saw the last set I posted of Shay you would understand why. When I photographed the amazing Penthouse Pet, I was running super late and I was worried we would run out of light. We shot the first set in her back yard where I knew we would have enough light, but then we decided to go inside to shoot the second set and somehow the light lasted just long enough for us to get some amazing shots. Because of the lack of light I shot most of the inside shots at 1.4 and if you are a camera nerd you will understand what that means. Basically to let in enough light I sacrificed depth of field making everything other than the main focus point blurry. I often shoot girls at 2.8 or lower because it looks nice but it is pretty hard to get the right things in focus when you are trying to do a shoot super fast before the sun goes down.  So I missed a few shots but I think we got some great stuff.  Shay is amazing and the light was lovely so it was hard to fuck up. The only problem with the set is that she is completely naked, except for an unzipped hoodie, in every shot so it was hard for find stuff that is safe for work for the main page.  I think that when your biggest problem with a set is that it is too NSFW you are probably doing something right.

So if you want to see way more of Shay Laren check out her website!  And if you wanna see my photos you should just click the link below.

Click here for the full set of the amazing Shay Laren!

And finally two weeks after SXSW ended I am finally getting up the last images from my ninth straight year. This gallery contains a bunch of photos from various parties I hit up during the music part of the festival.  There are a couple shots from a Wavves show and then I shot a day party that Ayad from Passion Pit put together and then rolled over to Hotel Vegan the Brooklyn Vegan party. That night I was sent to a party that had already ended so I just hung out at the bar and took a handful of photos. Thursday night I hit up the Spider House to shoot a little bit of Psych Fest the highlight being getting a waitress’ phone number and then Friday I went to see the Gories at Emo’s East but I didn’t shoot much because I didn’t have a photo pass and I wasn’t trying to fight mother fuckers to get shots of bands. And finally on Saturday night I put my camera down and just enjoyed the Off! show and then made it over to the Vice party. I was going to shoot Trash Talk but after I took three photos someone kicked my flash and the door that holds the batteries in flew into the mosh pit and was never seen again.  I had planned on going back later to search for it but then ASAP Rocky started a fight when someone threw a beer at him and chaos erupted and the cops broke up the party. I ended up that night at a house party where pretty much everyone I met that week just happened to be hanging out. I decided not to take photos but instead got a bunch of hot girls in my friend Mike’s van and we suddenly had a moving party.

Okay, this is going nowhere and I don’t have photos of half that shit so I am gonna put the keyboard down and just show you some of the damn photos.

Click here to see the photos from rest of my SXSW trip.

Ps. Shout out to Bleached and JC Brooks & The Uptown Sound the two best bands in this gallery.

So it appears that my site is working again… at least a little bit. Evidently some huge website was hot linking a bunch of zombie photos of mine and just ruining my bandwidth. I just deleted all the photos. No more zombies for you bro. Anyway, we got two more Austin galleries to go and first up is the MtvU Woodie Awards.

The Woodie Awards are some sort of awards that MTVU gives out during SXSW every year. I am sure a quick google search would explain their exact premise but I am not the sort of journalist that cares about anything. Instead I will just tell you the story of how I ended up at the Woodie Awards.

When I was in Austin I ran into a flyer for the Woodie Awards. The headlining acts were Steve Aoki, Santigold and Childish Gambino. I’ve known Aoki for ages and I have been trying to shoot Santigold for a minute since we have a bunch of mutual friends. Childish aka Donald Glover I met when the Village Voice was doing a cover story on him at last years SXSW and he and I have hung out a few times since then. So when I saw the flyer I was like, this is a thing I should be at. It just so happened I had a break in my Sailor Jerry schedule during the awards so I applied for a press pass. Unfortunately Childish Gambino broke his leg and couldn’t make it, but they had Mac Miller fill in for him.

When I got to the awards I went to look for the press area but all there was was a riser that was about 100 yards away from the stage so that we could shoot the bands. I tried to go back stage with my press pass to no avail. I ran into the Wire Image guy trying to get back there too so I grabbed a press guy and talked him into letting us backstage to get some shots. They weren’t doing an official red carpet but they had a mini one set up for MTV to film on. They told the Wire guy and I that we could shoot on it. Since there were only two still photographers I asked them if instead I could pull them off the carpet so they let me do some quick portraits of people like Skrillex, Dillion Francis, Zedd and A-Trak.

I had seen Aoki backstage before I talked my way in but he was no where to be found. The Wire guy asked one of the PR people if he could get shots of Steve and she walked him over to the trailer. I went with them and the Wire guy got all in my face about it so when he came out of Steve’s trailer I got the PR person’s attention and introduced myself. Turns out we have had many exchanges over email and she let me in. I said hey to Steve and took a few shots of him and Lil Jon and the other DJ’s in there with him and then I mentioned to Lil Jon that I had photographed him at the Gathering of the Juggalos. As soon as I said that everyone in the room just looked at us like “Why the fuck were you at the Gathering of the Juggalos?”  So in what was pretty much the highlight of my SXSW trip I got to talk to Lil Jon about juggalos for like 20 minutes. Lil Jon also was hilarious congratulating Skrillex on his Grammy Awards “Welcome to the club. I only got one of ‘em.”

At some point I tried to shoot Santigold but we were so far away from the stage I didn’t see the point so I just took about 10 photos and then headed back stage. I got a few more red carpet type shots of Machine Gun Kelly and Mac Miller with their awards and then I peaced the fuck out. The whole thing was a pretty fun diversion from all the branding work I did all week… now if only I could find out what the hell a Woodie Awards is…

Click here to see all my photos from backstage at the 2012 MTV Woodie Awards.

So everyone I know only cares about SXSW Music and over the last few years everyone in the tech community is raving over SXSW Interactive but as someone who has done nine South by Southwests I will tell you that by far my favorite part is SXSW Film.  I work my ass off during music week so I use the film fest as a mini vacation. I still work and cover the red carpets and things but I also get to see a bunch of movies. This year I think I saw 8 films and as with every other year they were all at least interesting if not fantastic. I also set up a few mini shoots with actors/directors from movies in the festival so I got some shots of something other than people standing on a yellow back drop.  Here are some highlights…

My favorite film of the festival was Safety Not Guaranteed. It’s a “quirky” film about a three journalists trying to do a story on a guy who posted a classified ad looking for a partner to travel back in time with him. It stars Mark Duplass and my biggest celebrity crush Aubrey Plaza. The film is absolutely hilarious, has fantastic performances from all the main rolls and ends with a bang. I got five minutes with Plaza, Duplass and Jake Johnson to do mini photo shoots which would have been awesome except about 30 seconds before I met the cast I stuck my hand in my pocket and when I pulled out a pack of gum I ripped open a cut on my hand and just started bleeding everywhere. It was really awesome meeting one of my favorite actresses with “I would shake your hand but it’s covered with blood.”

The most fucked up film of the festival was far and away was William Fridkin’s Killer Joe based of the Tracy Letts play of the same name. Matthew McConaughey stars as lawman turned hitman who has been hired by Emile Hirsch to kill his drug addicted mother so he can collect on her life insurance policy and pay back some scary people that he owes money. The also features Juno Temple, Thomas Haden Church and Gina Gershon in secondary rolls that they knock out of the park. Haden Church gives a really dark film moments of much needed hilarity with his dead pan delivery. Another one of my all time celebrity crushes, Gershon is involved in one of the most fucked up scenes ever put on film which I cannot even mention without ruining it but it involves fried chicken.

The most suprizing film was 21 Jump Street.  Every year at SXSW Film there seem to be one or two big blockbusters that premiere there and you aren’t exactly sure why. Festival curator Janet Pierson defended the Hollywood film before it’s introduction as saying they just like good movies and 21 Jump Street is hilarious.  She was right. I loved 21 Jump Street as a kid so I wanted to see it but I had very low expectations but the film ended up being one of the funniest movies I have seen this year. (I know it’s only March but I watch a lot of movies…) Jonah Hill was his normal funny self but he also produced the film and brought Channing Tatum on board. Tatum was unbelievably good in it and you have to give a lot of credit to Hill for believing that Tatum could actually be funny. If you aren’t aware, the 80′s TV show 21 Jump Street was not a comedy and instead of doing a remake the movie just takes the basic premise of the show (young looking cops going undercover in high schools) and making a really funny movie at it. Unlike other TV show film remakes they only took a few shots at the original show and instead focused on making a solid comedy that didn’t feel like a remake.

Lastly I wanted to talk about the premiere of HBO’s TV show Girls. I am gonna probably get into this show a lot more soon since it is written, directed and starring my friend Lena Dunham (and I even have a line in episode 7) but I wanted to at least mention it. Lena came to SXSW two years ago with her film Tiny Furniture and I was standing a few feet away from her when it won Best Naritive Feature and I was super proud of her and knew she was going to do big things.  I had no idea that she would blow up as quickly as she did. She showed the first three episodes of her Judd Apatow produced HBO comedy and they were even better than I imagined. Two Showtime execs were sitting next to me in the crowd and even they had to begrudgingly admit that the show was going to be a hit. Just be in front of a TV April 14th and you will see what I am talking about.

So yeah, SXSW Film was fucking awesome. I saw a bunch more stuff too so I just wanted to give quick nods to Mike Birbiglia’s Sleep Walk With me and Fat Kid Rules the World. Both were fantastic films that are well worth seeking out when they are released. And I also should mention that I shot photos of the stars/directors of Sun Don’t Shine, Beauty Is Embarrassing, Compliance and Small Apartments. I did’t get a chance to see any of the films but they all looked great and I hope to get a chance to see them soon.

Now click here to see all the photos I took during the 2012 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX.