I attempted to get the final photos from the Untold Festival up yesterday during my layover in Istanbul but, surprise, my website was blocked. I then had a 10 hour flight from there on two hours of sleep and then we got stuck on the runway for two hours and by the time I got home I was barely alive and I fell asleep and woke up 14 hours later. But here I am, functional once again, and ready to give you the final photos from my trip to a Transylvanian rave.

On day three I had this idea to walk to the festival with the two other American press people there for the fest. It was an under an hour walk and we got to see a little of the city. We got there and ate food and hung out a bit, but I didn’t shoot a ton of photos. Suddenly I realized it was 5:30 and the fest was taking us back to our hotel at 6 so I only took a few photos during the day. We went back to the hotel, packed up and took a little break because we all had stupid early flights the next morning and would be out late.

I got to the festival in time to see the Black Eyed Peas who were one of the few non-EDM musicians to perform. I was a pretty big fan of them before they became huge pop stars. Before Elepunk was released in 2003 they were sort of considered “Backpack Rap” and was a white college student I of course loved them along with groups like Jurassic 5 and all the Native Tongues stuff.  I was notably not a fan of the Fergie era BEP, but I was really surprised how much of their set I knew most of the words to. Fergie is no longer in the group, but they have someone doing her parts. Also, for the record Fergie was super nice to me when I met her and on two different occasions nearly a decade a part Will.i.am has completely ignored me when I asked him if I could take his photo. I am respectful enough to not do that paparazzi shit and the least you could do is make eye contact and tell me no. Okay, enough bitching.

After the BEP I went out and walked around checking the rest of the festival out and I sort of hit a wall. I don’t know if it was the jet lag or just three days of walking around a massive festival, but I was pretty beat. I still shot a bunch more photos because there was madness everywhere and it’s super easy to do it, but I also spent a bunch of time sitting on a hill just observing the whole thing. I also happened to eat the best cannoli I’ve ever had which is impressive given that I live in New York City and love cannoli and have gone to all the famous bakeries just to try their cannoli but fuck this thing was made with Nutella somehow and I would go to Transylvania again just to eat another one of those. 

Anyway, this whole thing was an incredible experience even if I don’t really care about dance music. Seeing 80k people listening to music together is amazing no matter what kinda music it is. Everyone was super nice and I think my only regret was that it wasn’t a super terrifying experience full of vampires, but instead a family friendly good time. And although I didn’t see any vampires, I did get bit by something and now my arm still itches 4 days later so it’s entirely possible that my arm is filled with vampire eggs that will hatch while I am sleeping and devour me in the night. Hey, you never know.

Click here to see my final gallery of photos from the Untold Festival in Transylvania, Romania. 

My second day at the Untold Fest was a lot longer than the first. It’s 24 hours but during the day it’s a bit slow with nothing going on on the main stage but plenty of things to do. I wanted to get some daylight shots in but I wanted good light so I went down just an hour or two before sunset. I think I am going to go down early today and then maybe come back to my hotel and finish this post because it’s 6am in NYC as I type this and 6am on a Sunday is not an ideal time to post content on to the internets. I also got a super early flight tomorrow so I don’t know if I am gonna stay out late tonight. Whatever the case part 3 of the Transylvanian rave photos will have to wait until Tuesday unless I can find decent WiFi on my layover in Istanbul tomorrow. 

Yesterday I actually took advantage of my press access and shot some of the main stage stuff from the photo pit. I didn’t bring a long lens because I hate carrying it and I wanted to focus on the crowd a lot more than the DJs. Still I got some shots of The Prodigy performing and some shots of Steve Aoki headlining at 4am although they kicked us out of the photo pit before he got into the crowd and did the fun stuff he does smashing children in the face with cakes, etc. It was crazy seeing Aoki play for a massive arena full of people. There are something like 70-80 thousand people who go to Untold every day and most of them were watching him DJ. I’ve seen the dude DJ for a couple dozen people at a pool party in Miami, so it’s pretty fucking insane to see a million kids holding up “Cake Me!” signs and going absolutely insane. 

Another thing I should mention is that I broke out two flashes last night for the first time in years. I have been organizing old nightlife photos and realized I was way better in like 2009. A big part of that is that I am not shooting party photos every day of my life anymore, but part of it is that my technique changed. I used to use two flashes. I would use the pop up flash on my camera as a fill light and then I would have that trigger a hand held flash which was my main flash. But when I bought my workhorse 24-70 lens it was too long for the pop up flash and would cast a shadow so I just stopped doing that. This trip I brought a second flash as a back up and I just decided to put one on my camera and have the other one trigger the flash and it honestly worked pretty well. I might have to stop being so fucking lazy and start shooting with two flashes again. I guess we will see…

Okay, that’s about it. I am gonna try to do some daytime stuff and come back and hit send on this post when I get back to the hotel. Check out these photos and I will see you guys when I get back to NYC (or at least when I get back to the Istanbul airport). 

Click here to see the photos from Saturday at the Untold Festival in Transylvania, Romania!

Less that two weeks ago I got an email from my friend Dave who runs the music blog Brooklyn Vegan. I was shooting a Gathering of the Juggalos gallery for him and he pitched me on another idea. He wanted to know if I wanted to go to a EDM festival in Transylvania. “I got offered a free trip to Romania to cover this festival. Do you want to go for us?” Obviously I had no choice but to say yes and here we are.

After a 20+ hour trip with an upsettingly long layover in Istanbul I made it to Cluj-Napoca, the capital city of Transylvania which is an actual place that exists and from what I can tell the locals have zero interest in talking to you about vampires. By the time I finally got to my hotel I had been awake for more than 30 hours. It was about 11pm in Cluj and I decided the smart move would be to miss day one of the festival completely and just get some damn sleep. I had three more days of the Untold Festival to attend. 

The team from Untold were great and offered all the media people a tour to see Transylvania during the day so the next day I jumped on a tour bus and got to see some of historic Cluj and then we headed out to a famous salt mine that for whatever reason has a sports complex/ amusement park in it. It was completely insane and I would talk about it more but I want to get these photos up and get back down to the festival, so you are just going to have to imagine if the Batcave was 300 feet deep and at the bottom a bunch of families were playing ping pong and rowing boats around the lake at the bottom. 

I finally got down to the festival around 10pm and had plenty of time to shoot considering music goes until after 5am and the festival is open 24 hours a day for the four days of the fest. They are not fucking around. I spent most of the night with one of the festival media guys Ioan and my friend Lina who I brought with me as a writer and another New Yorker who works for Tumblr. We pretty much just got the lay of the land and explored the festival. I didn’t shoot a ton, but I still came back to the hotel with more than 300 photos on my memory card.

By the time I finished editing photos it was after 6am and I was completely dead, so much so that I slept through my alarm today which I never do. It meant missing another media tour to check out Transylvania which I am honestly pissed about, but at least I had some time to get these photos up.

I am going to talk more about the festival when I post more pictures, but honestly I am not going to pretend to know what I am talking about when it comes to EDM (which is why I brought Lina with me) but I will just say that I got to see Hordor from Game of Thrones (aka Kristian Nairn) DJ and when I was in the media area Jason Derulo walked by me and he was wearing a t-shirt that said Jason Derulo on it which is kinda perfect.

I probably won’t post any more pictures from the festival until it’s all over which is why this gallery is called part one instead of day one (also it was day two of the festival so that’s confusing) but maybe I will get a chance to get more photos up tomorrow. There’s no tour tomorrow, but I have a feeling I am going to want to sleep in again…

Now click here to see my photos from part 1 of the Untold Festival in Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania.

Many years ago I met Aiden Ashley at a party. We talked about shooting when she came to visit NYC. It didn’t happen because of some drama that honestly had nothing to do with either of us, but it became a whole thing and we sort of avoided each other for a couple years until our mutual friend Samantha Bentley crushed the beef (when they were staying together when I shot these photos) that didn’t really even exist and then we became friends and everything was wonderful. 

So back in 2016 I was in LA and Aiden and I met up at her super spooky and amazing place to shoot some photos. It was night time and she was packing to go on tour the next day so instead of taking nice pretty photos we just fucked around and shot a bunch of random funny shit with a flash. The photos aren’t very good, but it was honestly a ton of fun. We got along really well and it was a blast just bull shitting and taking photos. We probably would have taken a ton more but her adorable dog got sick and she had to take care of the pup and that was the end of that. I hope she doesn’t hate me for forgetting about her photos for two years and we get to shoot again soon!

I discovered these photos and a few other lost sets when I was working on my Best of 2016 update and this is the second to last one to go up. I still have some photos of Dahlia Sky to go up from 2016 and I promise I will get to them eventually. My bad. A lot of this stuff got lost because it was in the same folder with my West Coast Road Trip and I forgot there was LA stuff in there and not just the actual road trip stuff. But hey, at least I know why I lost them instead of those photos of Ava Dalush that I edited and still forgot to post.

These Aiden Ashley photos have been on Girls of Driven By Boredom for like two weeks now and there are some extra explicit shots in there. I also am going to update Girls of DBB with something else before I head to Transylvania. Oh right, I am going to Transylvania for three days to cover an EDM festival for Brooklyn Vegan tomorrow. Yeah, I don’t know what the hell I am doing with my life either but I will be back the 6th which what I assume will be some insane photos. Follow me on Instagram in the meantime. And then go look photos of Aiden.

Click here to see a ton of absurd NSFW photos of Aiden Ashley hanging out in her super creepy home.

I had planned for this year’s Gathering of the Juggalos to be seven posts, but it turns out it’s only going to be six, but at least we got everything up before the weekend. This will be a good place to come back to and check out all my coverage from this year’s Gathering. 

The seventh post I was waiting for an article on Vice about the Bunk Police who are people who go around to festivals and test people’s drugs for them. They sell kits so you can test your own drugs and maybe end up saving your life. Apparently the juggalos actually have really good drugs and almost all the MDMA they tested was real which is very unusual. There was some fake acid and terrifyingly they found some cocaine with Fentanyl in it which is really scary. The article should be out Monday and I will update this page to include the link, but it’s not really about juggalos anyway and the photos I took for it were mostly just photos of them testing drugs so it wasn’t that interesting. I pulled my 10 favorite shots and just threw them in this already massive post, but make sure you check out that article when it comes out because it’s really interesting. Check out the Bunk Police here. 

Anyway, the rest of this gallery is just everything else. It’s just 200+ photos of juggalos that didn’t make sense to put anywhere else. There’s a bunch of crazy shit in here. A lot of nudity and madness and juggalo tattoos and Faygo flying and general chaos. Just tons of stuff to look at. And remember if you wanna see all the nudity from the fest including a bunch of way too NSFW stuff for here you should probably go over to Girls of Driven By Boredom and check the GOTJ 2018 gallery out. It’s a lot. 

I don’t really have much else to say but I hope you guys have enjoyed another year of juggalo madness and hopefully you guys will be excited when my juggalo book finally comes out. I am so ready to start really working on it finally.

Now check out all my coverage from the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos below:

VICE:
Juggalo Couples Tell Us How They Fell In Love
We Embedded With Vigilante Drug Testers at the Gathering of the Juggalos
Juggalos Tell Us How They’ve Been Affected by the Opioid Crisis

Noisey:
Thank God For Juggalos 

Brooklyn Vegan:
Gathering of the Juggalos 2018: NSFW pics

Kerrang!: 
Gallery: Gathering Of The Juggalos 2018

Driven By Boredom:
The Gathering Of The Juggalos Returns
Music Of The 2018 Gathering Of The Juggalos
Mike Busey At The Gathering Of The Juggalos
Random Events At The 2018 Gathering Of The Juggalos
2018 Juggalette Wet T-Shirt Contest

And finally click here to see the rest of the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH!

Every year the Gathering of the Juggalos has a Faygo wet T-shirt contest and for several years I covered it because nudity and juggalos both bring a lot of traffic to my website and the combination is pure gold. But the contest is a lot of work between trying not to get gear destroyed by Faygo, getting to the Gathering early in the day (the contest is usually one of the first events) and trying to deal with some questionable “media” trying to take photos as well. I just had done it a bunch and I didn’t need to cover it again.

This year however I had to do more daytime stuff because we got their late on the first day and left early on the last day and I wanted to make sure I had enough photos for all my clients. I actually just sort of ran into the contest and it had already started. Mike Busey and his crew were hosting it, but the photos are so wild I felt like it needed it’s own post instead of putting it in the Busey gallery I posted yesterday

The light was rally harsh in places so these photos aren’t particularly good, but they are very not safe for work. In fact some of them were way too NSFW so I had to make them exclusive to Girls of Driven By Boredom. So if you want to see all of the photos sign up for that.

In other news, currently I am writing this whilst working as an extra in the new Troma movie. It’s incredibly boring for no pay but being in a Troma movie is a long time bucket list and I get to update my website while they are shooting scenes that I’m not in. So yeah, go look at photos, and I will go back to being some sort of rich asshole in a fat suit aka a pillow. 

Click here to see the NSFW photos from the 2018 Juggalette Wet T-Shirt Contest!

Okay, let me dump one more Gathering of the Juggalos post on you today. This one is sort of a grab bag where I put photos that didn’t make much sense anywhere else. The Gathering has a ton of events during the day and then at 6pm the main stage band start. They end sometime after midnight and then the after parties start. The issue for me is that during the day the sunlight sucks and people are kinda hung over so it makes more sense to show up around 4pm and work until 2am or something, but then at night the light sucks too because you are shooting with a flash and the people you are traveling with talk you into leaving early.

So long story short is that I have a handful of photos from a handful of things. I think there are maybe two photos from some sort of Prince themed party and a few from a “Juggalo Yacht Club” party because that’s a real thing that happened. There’s a few other shots from some other after parties too but the gallery is honestly mostly fights.

I have blogged about the Juggalo Fight Club a lot. It’s a day time event thrown by the band Wolfpac who run one of the day time stages. It started out with juggalos on roller skates boxing and then over the years devolved into straight up bare knuckles boxing before eventually becoming a little more organized with a makeshift ring and MMA style gloves and things like that. 

This year I only got to see two matches (well 2.5) and I had to leave before the championship round but I did get to photograph the first ever female juggalo fight club fight which lasted about 15 seconds before one of the girls hurt her ear and quit. Fortunately another juggalette jumped in and actually won in pretty convincing fashion. The girl who lost bloodied the winner but then got her own head blooded by the ring and ended up having to quit after one round. She looked a little concussed but seemed fine shortly after. Let’s hope she is and let’s hope there are more juggalette fights next year cause feminism.

Oh and the ICP seminar is in here but the photos suck because they held it under a red tent so not the greatest lighting situation around and I am not gonna convert my photos to digital black and white like some hack. You heard me.

Click here to see the photos from the random events from the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos. 

This is the 5th year that Mike Busey and his “Busey Beauties” have been at the Gathering of the Juggalos. They seem to be loved by both juggalos and fans of this site. I even went to visit his traveling sideshow of strippers and freaks at their massive compound outside of Orlando. They are a bunch of lunatics (and an Obama impersonator) and they fit right in at the Gathering and I have a bunch of photos that are a solid mix of “sexy” and “horrifying”. You will enjoy it.

This gallery is a mix of a few things. There are the photos I took on their bus with CKY and some of the Beauties just being drunk and fun on a bus and then there are the photos from their set up on the campground where they spent all week giving lap dances to anyone who bought a t-shirt.

There are also pictures from their stage show on Saturday night which at one point involved a “butthole beauty pageant” which is exactly what it sounds like. The judge was Flip Flop the Clown, a notorious weirdo, rapper, and foot fetishist who actually performed anilingus on one of the contestants leaving a perfect clown face make up stain on her which was easily one of the funniest things I have ever seen and when I Tweeted about it the photo went viral (very NSFW!). 

The stage show also featured to men taped dick to dick and have sausages shot out of a cannon at them in order to win tickets to next year’s Gathering (they both won) and a veteran getting a naked lap dance from all the girls (he was the naked one) and a ton of other horrifying things, many of which are too graphic to post on this website.

That being said, if you do want to see all the real graphic stuff, you can go to Girls of Driven By Boredom and pay a couple dollars to see all the shots (and a lot of other exclusive high res content). You can always cancel right after. Just saying.

Lastly, the Buseys also hosted a Faygo wet t-shirt contest which you can see right now on Girls of DBB, but will be up on my website soon (minus the truly graphic moments). 

Okay, that’s all I got for now, but there is a lot of wild stuff in this gallery so you should go look at it or whatever.

Click here to see Mike Busey and the Busey Beauties take over another Gathering of the Juggalos.

This post should be a fairly quick one because The Gathering of the Juggalos is the only festival that I get sent to where people don’t want photos of the bands. In the past the festival has had some huge headliners but the last few years the festival has stuck to more juggalo friendly bands instead of big national acts. Clients of mine don’t really want to see photos of juggalo rappers so here we are.

I did shoot some music though and I will go through the gallery real quick. When I got to the Gathering Immortal Technique was playing. I would have shot him but I missed most of his set. The first photos in this gallery are of the day one headliner ABK. Unless you are a juggalo you have no idea who that is, but I assure you juggalos love him despite his lisp. I photographed some girls named Glitter Money on one of the late night tents but we were leaving so I don’t even know what they sounded like.

The next day I shot Ouija Macc cause I kinda know that dude and his old group Swag Toof was from NYC and so it’s cool that he’s now on Psychopathic records. Gwar also played that night which is always awesome except when they cut Donald Trump in half I got covered in his blood and I am not sure I will ever get it all off me. I have no idea who the one photo of one woman in a No Lives Matter shirt is, but my friend Contessa was listening to her and I took one shot as I was meeting up with her before we went back to the hotel.

Day three photos include some of RA Da Rugged Man who I actually think is a great rapper but also he hit my hat while I was trying to take his photo which seemed kinda unnecessarily agro so I’m n0t gonna hype him. The person I was most excited to see was Esham who invented horror core rap. Pretty much everyone who came out of Detroit was influenced by him. I assure you Eminem and ICP wouldn’t ever have existed with Esham. He played the Gathering once before when I was there but it was late at night and I missed it. He was punk as fuck. Hopsin played that night but I was doing some shit and didn’t get down in time to shoot him. TechN9ne played after that and I love that dude but I also have photographed him at every Gathering so let’s move on.

Lastly, we left early on Day 4 so we didn’t shoot ICP or Yelawolf (I have photographed them both a bunch so I wasn’t worried about it), but I did get to shoot my friend Contessa aka CuntMafia. Contessa just decided she would come to the Gathering with me and it was clear pretty quickly she belonged there. Whenever we would stop in middle America on our road trip, people would stare at her, but at the Gathering of the Juggalos she blended in. I asked the dudes in the Wolfpac if she could perform on their stage and they were all about it and she played 4 songs and kinda killed it to be honest. My new goal is to actually get her booked next year. It was awesome.

Okay, that’s all I got. This was longer than it was supposed to be and I got 5 more updates to go. Be back tomorrow with a couple more. Whoop whoop, etc.

Click here to see the music of the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.