April 28-30, 2017 With a summer full of hippies and electronic music it might be surprising to see the adventures start with a gallery of cowboy hats and cheap beer. Stagecoach Festival, as California's premier country music festival is held the weekend directly following Coachella and is even on the same grounds. They are, in many ways, mirror images of each other with variances simply based on the demographic attracted to each genre. According to security guards who worked both weekends, country fans get considerably more drunk and rowdy than a bunch of stoned ravers. I was working the festival not as a normal photographer, but with a Wells Fargo photo booth. If you look at the third photo you'll see the restored stagecoach we used for posing - or drunkenly climbing. The Booth is a photo booth company based in NYC that has hired my assistance for a variety of events in LA. For Stagecoach we had an intriguing photo setup that took three successive photos and combined them into a GIF animation that we then emailed to guests via iPads. This meant that over the course of three scorching days in the desert I would easily lose my voice as a countdown was screamed prior to each photo.
The leader of The Booth, Ian Londin, a fellow RIT alum, was a fantastic boss in allowing me to take my break not only to eat, but to shoot as well. So, this selection of interesting people is taken from my time wandering during my lunch break.
As a bonus I've added pictures of the three fine people I worked closest with that weekend: Ian Londin, Andrew Dominguez, and Jasmyn Skye, respectively.