(Most of) CoolDad's Year In Pictures

Ummm... I saw a few shows

There have been lots of side effects from running this blog and contributing over at Speak Into My Good Eye. One of the most fun -- and potentially most expensive -- for me has been a growing interest in photography. Concert photography, anyway.

I started the year with my Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone and a Panasonic Lumix ZS20. The ZS20 is a nice, little point and shoot with a 20X optical zoom and lots of manual controls; but it suffers from the same problems that plague all point and shoot cameras. Its tiny sensor (the digital film) just isn't big enough for capturing light in dark situations. I did use it to get some decent pictures at the Taylor Swift show at Prudential Center and at the David Byrne / St. Vincent show at Count Basie. It was my primary camera for the daytime sets at FYF, but it didn't cut it during dark, indoor concerts.

About halfway through the year, I got a Panasonic Lumix LX7. It's still a point and shoot, but it has a much bigger sensor and a much faster (lets more light in) lens. It works pretty well at places like Asbury Lanes, The Saint, and The Wonder Bar, where I can get up close. It also shoots in a format called RAW that bypasses the camera's built-in photo adjusting and retains much more information. I found, later in the year, that shooting RAW allowed me to recover a good deal more detail in photos that I thought were too dark to be rescued.

The next step up would be either the "Mother of all Point and Shoots," the Sony RX100 II, or some type of interchangeable lens system camera. The holidays are almost here, so who knows?

Anyway, I decided to post kind of a photo essay covering many of the shows I went to and photographed this year. I think I've moved up from "100% miss" photographer to "hit or miss, mostly miss" photographer. The pictures show that progression, I think, over the course of the year.

I took it upon myself to "cover" lots and lots of stuff in Asbury Park and beyond this year. Most of it is here under the "Show Reviews" tab. Some of it is over at Speak Into My Good Eye, which you can get to from here by clicking the tab of the same name. Going through all of the photos made me realize that going to all of those shows and editing all of the photos as a one-man operation was a lot of work -- more work than I've ever done at any actual job, probably -- but it never felt that way. That probably says something.

Here are just some highlights that struck me for one reason or another. You can see the full sets from each show in the original posts. I've got lots of pics that I've never posted. If you want to see more, then just let me know. Also, there were several shows -- Joe Michelini at the Berkeley, Titus Andronicus / The Everymen at Brooklyn Bowl, Bob Mould at Bowery Ballroom, The So So Glos / The Everymen at Maxwell's, Frank Black at The Wonder Bar, Dinosaur Jr. at Irving Plaza, My Bloody Valentine at FYF and Hammerstein ballroom, and many others at Langosta, Berkeley, Happy Mondays, etc. -- for which I was armed only with my phone or the pictures were too dark to be useful. I won't subject you to those.

So, after all of that, here's (most of) my year of shows in pictures.