The Shoot With Personality you see today is not the first incarnation of SWP. I began doing live band photography in 2000, when I’d go see my friends’ play local shows with their bands. By 2002, I registered shootwithpersonality.com, as a place to put those photos as well as snapshots of friends when we were all attending shows. In 2009, I changed SWP to a blog/portfolio site. The sheer volume of band photos meant that most of the ones I took at shows in the early days of my photographic “career” didn’t make it into the new SWP photo galleries. I felt like this was the right move for my website, but I felt it left my friends without a place to look at pictures from the good ole days.
I’ve had plans to find a way to get a lot of these older photos back onto my website in some way, as a gift to those who’d like to look back on years past. This plan got derailed when my external hard drive took a dive and was rendered completely useless at the beginning of 2012, meaning a lot of the photos archived on it are unreadable. There are some photos which I may never recover. The plan right now is to publish the photos that I am able to gather, bit by bit, and have them available in a photo gallery on SWP. You’ll always be able to find these photos if you go to the Photo Gallery link you see above, and visit the “live band photography” section. In the olden days, I didn’t know that I needed to save high resolution copies of my photo scans, so I will apologize on the front end that the photos aren’t quite as large as others found on SWP!
As you see the shows I’ve been able to get online as of right now, you’ll see that it doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the bands I’ve photographed and that which used to be housed on SWP. Never you worry. I’ll be working diligently to get more archived here. I feel like this is the least I can do, since all those shows I photographed and friends I made along the way have shaped me as both a photographer and a person.
