And I’m back! I didn’t think that in this day and age it would take over a month to restore an internet connection, but no mind. I’m back in the land of high-speed internet and I’m oh so very happy about it.

A bit has been going on while I was away. Knew I needed to make a decision in regards to photos, doing sporatic gigs was very unsatisfying, so it was time to either stop altogether, or get back into the swing of things properly. As luck would have it, I got offered some regular ongoing work by a national ticketing agency, taking photos at their Perth shows. And as they put on heaps of shows, there’s no shortage of work. I stick to mainly the indie/rock gigs, and over the last few weeks I’ve shot the West Coast Blues and Roots Festival, Children Collide, Okkervil River, and The Grates. So it’s definitely work AND play, and I’m quite happy with how things are travelling at the moment. On top of that, I’ve done one live shoot for Triple J’s national magazine ‘JMag’, with another one lined up in about two weeks.

I’ve also currently got photos in two exhibitions around town, three photos in the WAMi ‘Kiss My Camera’ showcase at the WA Museum, and one at the Photographers In Perth curated ‘Fables and Nocturnes’ show, at Behind the Monkey on Beaufort St. I’ll put some photos up once I get a chance to pop along to them with a camera. Fables and Nocturnes runs til May 30th, and Kiss My Camera until June 28, so plenty of time to get along.

Tonight will see the return of Sunday Night Music Club, it’s pretty hard to upload songs when you’re more or less on dialup speed! Because I didn’t get around to doing my ‘WAMi Week Music Club’ due to lack of internets, tonight’s will most definitely have a local flavour.

And in completely non-photographic news, I recently bought MarioKart on Wii, so if anyone wants to play online and absolutely belt me (I’m not really very good) email me with your friend code.

While our American neighbours voted today for change, you can cast your vote in a far far less important election. A few weeks ago I entered four photos into the Perth Dance Music Awards ‘Best Scene Photograph’ competition and promptly forgot about it. Today I discover all four of my photos have been shortlisted, and are up for voting. Must’ve been a slow year for submissions, I’ve only shot two events that qualified, so had to scrounge up photos for submission.

But that said, it’d be quite nice to win, as the prize is a hire voucher for a Nikon D700 and lenses. Now, I’m not looking at switching teams any time soon, but I’ve been wanting to have a play with one for quite some time.

So if you’d like to vote, head on over to http://www.perthdancemusicawards.org/vote.php. You don’t have to sign up or log in ro anything. Nice and quick. My photos are #1, #3, #14, #15. Out of all of them I probably like #1 the best, but vote for whatever!

A month or so ago I stumbled upon a photography magazine called PHOTOICON. They’d done the unthinkable and dedicated an entire issue to concert photography. Yes, an entire issue. With awesome contributors. So while I was a bit turned off by the slightly uppity statement ‘The cool new cosmopolitan magazine of photography’ across the cover, it was still something I couldn’t pass up. $15 and a matter of days later it was in my hot little hands.

 Absolutely thoroughly recommended. Head on over to the PHOTOICON website to order a back issue (with free international postage). Interesting addition to anyone’s collection. And it’s Issue 7 you want to buy, just in case Jimi Hendrix on the cover wasn’t enough of a giveaway.

Little bit of Tuesday night reading for you. This article was posted in the Concert Photography Flickr forum, and while I may have been swayed by the inclusion of my eternal favourite Jill Furmanovsky, I thought it was a pretty interesting little read. Going over how it was, how it is, and how it might end up in the future.

Clicky click through to see the online version of the mag, complete with all the pretty pictures.

So, it’s been all quiet on the western front once again, but I do have a pretty good excuse this time. Spent a couple of days in hospital getting my tonsils removed to cure me of this particular condition (which you may not want to read about while eating), and then a few days laid up in bed battling the irony of having to eat and drink normally while not being able to swallow. I’m up and about now, and feeling a bit better, so I thought it’d be as good a chance as any to catch up on some posts.

There’s two gigs worth of live photos, and one very enjoyable promo shoot session done with one of my favourite Perth bands. I’ve got another week of R&R ahead of me before I go back to work, so expect them sometime soon.

While I had planned on spending most of my recouperation time in front of the TV catching up on Doctor Who and Hornblower episodes, I’m pretty sure the boredom will set in pretty quickly, so I’ve decided to get started on the project that’s been ‘in the works’ for years. Since the self-published book phenomenon took hold of the internet I’ve been wanting to do one up of my own work. Problem was, it was time consuming, the books were expensive and the ones that weren’t were less customisable than I liked. And the major problem, I take new photos all the time, what if I sent it away for publishing and then took the best photo I’d ever taken the next day? The first part was solved when I found Blurb. Their prices were good for the product they delivered, and enough people I knew had used them and been happy with them for me to jump on the bandwagon. I decided the second part would be best covered by doing several books in an almanac sort of series, one for each year. Not only does it mean the content would be static and I’d have no desire to add new stuff to it, I think it’ll be a great way of seeing how I’ve changed as a photographer over the years.

At this stage I don’t think I’ll be making them available for public purchase, but I’ll see how they turn out. I threw together a small square softcover book on Blurb last night as a test print titled ‘A Scrap of Noise: An Introduction to the Photography of Jacinta Mathews’ which has gone to print, and should be in my hot little hands in the next couple of weeks. If it scrubs up well I’ll think about making it available for a limited period, at no markup. It works out to about $25ish Aussie dollars with postage which frankly I think is more than enough to pay for a mix of 19 fairly eclectic photos!

Anyway, that’s all from me for now. Expect those updates shortly, but for the moment I’m off for a date with The Doctor.

Will do a proper photo post tomorrow, but just before I do, I would appreciate it IMMENSELY if you could go over to the JPG Magazine website (and sign up if you’re not already a member), and vote for my Wolfmother photo, which I’ve submitted in the ‘On Stage’ category. JPG Mag is one of the few that I’d be happy to be published in ‘just for the exposure’, cause it’s such an awesome mag (but because it’s so awesome, they do pay for the use).

Direct link to my photo is http://www.jpgmag.com/photos/827963

Many many thankyous coming your way. I normally would never pimp my stuff like this, but I’d really love to get in this magazine. Snowman, Sugar Army and Schvendes photos to come sometime tomorrow.

Firstly, apologies about the title. It doesn’t really fit the subject, but I’m going to find any excuse to slip an Eddie Izzard quote in.

 While browsing the latest issue of Blunt over lunch today, I came across a quote from Scott Owen of The Living End, weighing into the analog recording vs ProTools debate. Seems to adapt to the ever-ongoing film vs digital war, and I really liked the analogy.

“You want to be able to record onto tape and get your takes done. Piecing it all together on a computer, there’s no thrill and no real reward in that. If you play a helicopter flight simulator and you crash, you just hit re-set. But if you learn to fly a helicopter and you crash, you die. The thing is, at least when you’re flying you actually get the thrill of flying.”

 Was from an interview done during the recording of their soon-to-be-released album ‘White Noise’. I’m very much looking forward to it, I’m a big Living End fan, and their last record ‘State of Emergency’ is one of my top 10 favourite albums ever.

This morning I woke up to a nice surprise, an interview with lil ol’ me on the Isolated Sounds website. Isolated Sounds is a new website focusing on the behind the scenes and support sectors of the Perth music industry, including but not limited to, promoters, producers, managers, photographers and film makers. I’m always up for anything that’s being used to promote the local scene, so when Christina emailed me, I couldn’t say no.

Check it out at  http://isolatedsounds.wordpress.com/july08jacintamathews/

Not a lot to report on the photo front, my run of bad health has continued and landed me with tonsilitis. I did however manage to squeeze in shooting Snowman’s album launch at the Bakery, so I might pop some photos from that up soon.

Just a quick update, will do a proper photo-spam next week with all I’ve been up to over the last few weeks.

 I’ve just created myself an account over at Red Bubble, after months of hearing from fellow photographers how great it was. It seems to be a super easy and efficient way of selling prints, and I’ve heard the quality is really good, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out. I only have a couple of photos up at the moment, but will be adding more in the coming weeks.

Hey there, and welcome to my new website and blog! Big big thanks to Alex MacRae for putting it all together for me.  He’s pretty much a genius, and ridiculously multi-talented.

For those who don’t know me, my name’s Jacinta, I do a whole lot of live music photography, and some other stuff when it takes my fancy. I shoot for Drum Media, and I’m out and about pretty much every weekend, either shooting or watching my favourite local bands. I don’t have an overly interesting story, sorry. And I’m very much self taught, so I’m in no way a font of knowledge when it comes to shooting live gigs. I just do it. I really don’t think about it that hard. But if you have any questions or comments, do send em through. Mainly just so I know people are actually reading…*cough*

Just a reminder that all older content can still be found at http://mojojay.wordpress.com/ . I’ll be leaving that up as long as WordPress lets me I guess.