Shooting Alice in Chains at Uproar festival 2013

While I'm not shooting The Dead Daisies I sneak around and shoot other bands on the Uproar Festival;)
Here is few of Alice in Chains:

In recording studio with The Dead Daises

We took 3 days off the Rockstar UPROAR TOUR that I'm are currently on with The Dead Daisies and spending some time in Excello recording studio in Brooklyn, NY making some new music.
Here are few pics:

 Photography by Katarina Benzova

Happy 65th b'day Robert Plant!

photo credit: Neal Preston

A very happy birthday to Robert Plant, who turned 65 today.  The legendary Led Zeppelin frontman may have reached the traditional age of retirement, but he doesn’t seem to be planning to stop sharing his golden voice with the world anytime soon. 

While Plant hasn’t performed live with his surviving Led Zeppelin band mates since their memorable London reunion concert in December 2007, he’s thrown himself into a number of other projects, including a Grammy-winning collaboration with bluegrass star Alison Krauss.  Currently, Robert has been busy touring with his latest group, the Sensational Space Shifters, and also has been preparing a new solo studio album.

Of course, Plant first and foremost will always be known for his contributions to Led Zeppelin, the band that helped define hard rock and heavy metal.  His banshee wail and seductive stage moves have inspired and influenced countless other singers, while his band’s music continues to serve as the soundtrack rock fans lives all over the planet.

Plant currently has two upcoming concerts with the Sensational Space Shifters on his itinerary — an August 29 show in Bristol, U.K., and a September 31 appearance at the 2013 Electric Picnic festival Laois, Ireland.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

30 Unique And Must-See Photos From Our Past

Photographs have long been used to record special and unique moments – birthdays, weddings and the occasional selfie are all commonplace. But these next 30 photographs go beyond the norm – they encapsulate the mood, tone and values of yesteryear, a compelling account of the evolution of our values if you will.
From landmarks in history, strange feats of physical endurance through to peculiar devices & oddball characters we hope this series of images will astound, confound and enthrall you.

1. Unpacking the Head of the Statue of Liberty delivered June 17, 1885

2. The hippo belonged to a circus and apparently enjoyed pulling the cart as a trick 1924

3. Charlie Chaplin in 1916 at the age of 27

4. Annie Edison Taylor (1838-1921), the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1901.

5. Sharing bananas with a goat during the Battle of Saipan, ca. 1944

6. Advertisement for Atabrine, an anti-malaria drug. Papua, New Guinea during WWII

7. Artificial legs, United Kingdom, ca. 1890

8. 1920′s lifeguard

9. Bookstore ruined by an air raid, London 1940

10. Testing new bulletproof vests, 1923

11. Suntan vending machine, 1949

12. A space chimp poses for the camera after a successful mission to space in 1961

13. Unknown soldier in Vietnam, 1965

14. Little girl comforting her doll in the ruins of her bomb damaged home, London, 1940

15. Illegal alcohol being poured out during Prohibition, Detroit 1929

16. Austrian boy receives new shoes during WWII

17. Construction of the Berlin wall, 1961

18. Animals being used as a part of medical therapy in 1956

19. Hitler’s officers and cadets celebrating Christmas, 1941

20. Children eating their Christmas dinner during the Great Depression: turnips and cabbage

21. The real Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, ca. 1927

22. Abraham Lincoln’s hearse, 1865

23. A most beautiful suicide – 23 year old Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from an observation deck (83rd floor) of the Empire State Building, May 1, 1947. She landed on a United Nations limousine…

24. A mom and her son watch the mushroom cloud after an atomic test 75 miles away, Las Vegas, 1953

25. A penniless mother hides her face in shame after putting her children up for sale, Chicago, 1948

26. Annette Kellerman promoted women’s right to wear a fitted one-piece bathing suit, 1907… She was arrested for indecency.

27. Martin Luther King Jr. with his son by his side removing a burnt cross from his front yard, 1960

28. Walter Yeo, one of the first people to undergo advanced plastic surgery & a skin transplant.

29. Princeton students after a freshman vs. sophomores snowball fight in 1893

30. Melted and damaged mannequins after a fire at Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, 1930

 


Via CavemanCircus

HAPPY B'DAY MICK JAGGER!!!

 

Mick Jagger 1977/photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot

Mick Jagger will celebrate his 70th birthday Friday, his ecstatic reception last month at the Glastonbury Festival still ringing in the ears, as just one of a generation of wrinkly rockers determined not to go quietly.

The Stones raised the roof at the British music festival on June 29 with a two-hour performance featuring hits from their 50-year back catalogue, including “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”.

Still athletic thanks to a rigorous health and fitness regime, Jagger doesn’t have any problems belting out the numbers either.
Pensionable they may be — Jagger’s birthday will bring their combined age to 277 — but superannuated they are not.
The Glastonbury show was so popular one reviewer said a circus contortionist would have been hard pressed to get within 500 yards (metres) of the stage, and it garnered rave reviews as well as affectionately mocking headlines.
“Glastonbury’s night of the living dead”, said the Daily Mail newspaper, joking that while “Mick looked ready for more, Keith looked in need of a warm malt drink”.

Last year, Jagger and fellow pensioners Keith Richards — 70 later this year — Charlie Watts, 72, and Ronnie Wood, 66, also played to packed houses on their “50 and Counting” tour to mark the group’s 50th anniversary.
“I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a 60th anniversary,” said Richards at the time.
And the Stones — creaking hips and knees permitting — are far from alone.

Many of those who started off with them in the sixties are still performing — alongside musicians who grew up listening to their music and are young enough to be their grandchildren.
The Who, with Roger Daltrey, 69, and Pete Townshend, 68, still tour and last year closed the London Olympics with crowd pleasers Baba O’Riley and “My Generation”.
Earlier this year, David Bowie, 66, surprised the music world with a new album, “The Next Day”, his first in a decade.
His wife Iman hinted that a tour might be in the pipeline despite earlier denials.
Last year, Bob Dylan, 72, Leonard Cohen, 78, and Patti Smith, 66, also recorded new albums, dispelling any lingering sense that pop music is the exclusive territory of the young.
All three continue to criss-cross the world to appear on stage.
Brian Wilson, 71, last year reformed the Beach Boys for the group’s 50th anniversary and released an album, and Paul McCartney, also 71, continues to compose and perform to packed houses.

                       photo by Mark Seigler

A documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year saw forgotten 1970s folk musician Sixto Rodriguez rediscovered.
The “Sugar Man” of Detroit, 71, has since undertaken a sell-out world tour and also put in an appearance at Glastonbury.

But if artists are happy to carry on long beyond what many would have once considered their sell-by date, others wonder if such geriatric rock could stifle younger talents.

“We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band re-formations and reunion tours, expanded reissues of classic albums and outtake-crammed box sets, remakes and sequels, tribute albums and mash-ups,” British writer Simon Reynolds said in his 2011 book “Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past”.
“But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of culturalecological catastrophe where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted?”

by Taboola/The Raw Story

Morrison Hotel Gallery

                                                                                                 (photo by Katarina Benzova)

Two Morrison Hotel Galleries exist in New York — at 124 Prince St.in SoHo and at 313 Bowery, next to the site of punk's most sacred dump, CBGB.

 The company's other attempts to sustain galleries in the last decade, in San Diego and L.A., foundered.

"There just isn't the street traffic there," Diltz explains. 

"One hundred people walk by a minute in the summer in New York. They see these photos and they're drawn in."

It's no wonder why. The galleries , which now represent some 80 photographers , lure us in with images that tug at our memories by framing candid expressions of stars we've long fantasized about.
At their most routine, they're objects of nostalgia — no more artistic than a poster. But at their best, they're works of insight. Through their light, composition and the star's preserved expression, they crystal lize an icon's central allure.

Morrison Hotel's images range from Herman Leonard's muscular shots of jazz stars in the '40s and '50s (a young Miles Davis, a sensual Lena Horne) to Diltz and Joel Bernstein's woodsy portraits of the seminal '60s singer-songwriters, Mick Rock's in-your-face shots of glam rockers from the '70s, Janette Beckman's animated take on hip-hop artists of the '80s and Merri Cyr's rapturous shots of Jeff Buckley in the '90s.

The idea that birthed the galleries began in a place that has inspired many a musical notion — the road. In the '90s, Diltz began traveling the country selling prints of his photos in make shift spaces — with some success. Together with Blachley, a former record executive, and Rich Horowitz, an independent record store owner, he hit on the notion of finding a permanent space — preferably in New York, and ideally in SoHo.
The spot they found, on Spring St ., came with a rent of $35,000 a month, an impossible levy for the trio at the time. So they proposed a reduced fee to lease it on a short-term basis. In time, they bounced to another SoHo space, on Greene St., before building up enough business to sign their current long term lease at Prince. (The Bowery outlet opened in 2006.)
Before Morrison Hotel took over the Prince space, the previous renters hosted a widely covered show of 9/11 photography. Once the rockers occupied the space, "American Photography magazine said we were taking on the spirit of 9/11," says Diltz. "We weren't leaving downtown no matter what. Also, we were bringing back the spirit of So Ho, before the artists left."
As a marketing hook, Diltz says, the gallery started hawking its pieces as fine art music photography, " as opposed to other web sites and galleries which went for fistpumping tags like ‘photos of the legends of rock,' " which he felt "cheapened it."
Blachley says the galleries' location in New York made it inevitable that their most popular subject would be Bruce Springsteen (particularly Danny Clinch and Frank Stefanko's images from the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" period). Also big have been shots of Keith Richards, Jim Morrisonand Bob Dylan.
To Diltz, the central allure of these works lies in their casual intimacy. The Joni Mitchell shot came spontaneously during a long afternoon's rambling conversation.
"They're ‘hang out' photos," Diltz says. "They weren't at all set up."

That contrasts with most of today's musician photos, which have the formality and self-consciousness of fashion shoots.
The documentary quality of the vintage pieces has earned increasing respect of late. In 2009, theBrooklyn Museum featured its first show presenting music photography as art, mimicking similar events at London's National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. Blachley says the Smithsonian has approached his company to help with a music -theme d show of its own in 2014.
Meanwhile, the value of these photos has been appreciating, aided by the glow of history and the widening wallets of baby boomers. Shots by Jim Marshall (the great lensman of '60s San Francisco fl ower power) "gained an extra zero" in their prices after his death in 2010, according to Diltz.
Still, Blachley says most people purchase these shots "not because of their monetary value but because of their memories. When they see these images, it reminds them of a time in their lives that they still want to be a part of. Every morning, they want to get up and see that beauty."

(article by jfarber@nydailynews.com )

B&W power

                

                                                                                                                       photo by Katarina Benzova

In the early days of photography, photographers had no choice but to shoot in black and white, as it was the only available medium. Then, in 1936, the invention of kodachrome gave colour photography to the world. But black and white photography didn’t die off, instead it flourished. Modern black and white photography at it’s best is art, and many photographers regard it as the purest form of photography.

So why does black and white photography command such acclaim? One reason is that colour is a distraction. It takes attention away from the visual building blocks of a great photo; texture, tonal contrast, shape, form and lighting. A photographer shooting in black and white has to learn how to use all these elements to create a memorable image.

Another reason is that color photography, much of it mediocre, is so abundant that black and white makes a refreshing change.

From an artistic viewpoint; color depicts reality. Black and white is an interpretation of reality.

(Andrew Gibson /Photo tuts)