Turntabl1sm

24 Sep 2005

This was the first event I did photography for in an 'official' capacity. It was a DJ competition, the state finals, with 7 DJ's going head to head to win the chance to go to the national finals, and probably from there on to the international finals.

These guys were good, but not in the usual DJ sense. They got about 3 minutes to show their stuff, so they had to cram something into that time to get noticed. I've never seen vinyl slapped down so fast, tracks mixed so quickly, before being (sometimes) literally flung on the floor to get the next disc and it's 10 seconds of track in. They had their records stacked up one on top of the other, with little stickers to mark exactly where to throw the needle. And if that wasn't enough, one guy even spun himself round and did some mad scratching with his back to the decks! The crowd loved it. And another guy bounced the turn-table arm up against it's bracket so the vibration fed through to the needle and thumped out of the speakers in time to the music! Like I said, not your usual DJ stuff.

As each DJ finished up his spot, he'd clear out his records, and then remove his needle from each deck (each DJ brought their own needles!) before letting the next guy in. Took a few minutes to change everything over so in the downtime I snapped a few macros. Another of my top ten favourite shots.

THIEVES FUCK OFF!

edit 12/04/06 :: This image is without a doubt my most stolen image, which is bad enough. But what's worse is that people keep on hotlinking which steals my bandwidth and that's just not cool! So I think I'll play a bit of a game with anyone who hotlinks, which should give them a bit of a surprise!

If you want to use this image on your site, please leave a comment explaining why and I'll consider it. To not ask is just plain rude, and since this is my copyrighted image, you would be stealing.

DJ STYLISTIC FUCK OFF!

edit 07/05/06 :: Hey, DJ Stylistic. Fuck off you low-life scumbag. Bet you got a bit of a surprise when I changed the image to a piece of DOGSHIT. Your webpage looked really good with it as a background. Do me a favour and go steal someone else's image.

[edit 07/05/06 :: Alright, I hate to watermark images, but this image continues to be my most stolen, and the biggest cause of bandwidth theft. Seems that people (eg DJ "I'm a fuckin moron" Stylistic) insist on linking directly from my server, which for you ignorant myspace users is called hotlinking (go on, click the link and read it, learn something new today!). I think my webhost has finally gotten hotlink protection working properly so this may not be an issue anymore, but I'm tired of my shit being ripped off so hotlink protection or not, this image will stay watermarked. Which is a massive shame because it's a fantastic photo that deserves to be seen without any interference. Oh well, just the way it goes I guess.]

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