A Camera in the Crowd[1], also referred to as Camera Crowd was started in the Summer of 2006 between two friends: Anne Lai and Charlie Lumanlan. They have already tried starting and running different photography/music communities(Exposing Distortion and Enteraction) for two years. This is right now the only music&photography blog that we know of.
The two bloggers lives in different cities, Anne is 17 and lives in Houston and Charlie is 21 and lives in San Francisco. Posts are written by both bloggers with the bylines located at the bottom of every post in Camera Crowd.
There a few favorite bands that Camera Crowd will keep close tabs on and inform readers if anything new happens with these bands. This is including, but not excluding any future favorites:
- Voxtrot [2]
- Sparrow House [3]
- Peter and the Wolf [4]
- Explosions in the Sky [5]
- Rilo Kiley/Jenny Lewis [6]
This blog's pace is slower than most, giving time to readers to digest every post and song. This also ensures that the bands featured are actually worthy of recognition.
The blog features several types of regular posts:
3 minute entry: a post kept short and easy for the reader to read in three minutes or less. The concise description style still provides a good idea of what the band/artist sounds like and includes mp3s and links for the ones who want to know more. These short reads refreshes and separates it from the usual lengthier and in-depth posts on the blog.
Upcoming Release: a post featuring unreleased albums that are about to come out. With these, they will include history of the band, talk about previous albums in the band's catalog, new upcoming tours and most importantly the new sound in the upcoming album. There is a track-by-track short one line description that readers can read by hovering their cursor over any of the tracks in the tracklisting section. Typically three downloads are made available to stream and download, depending on how many songs are on the album.
Oh Snap!: a post that was introduced in January 2007 called , exclusively written by Charlie. He features photography gizmos and gadgets and other photography-related websites and a flickr pool. They also ask if anyone else knows of any photography news coming up to email them.
Anticipate: a post written on upcoming tours by bands that are more well-known and have already been introduced usually through a 3 minute entry or another previous post.
Singled Out: a post that is basically a track review, but without a scale or rating system. Despite the name, the songs that are featured aren't necessarily singles, but the songs must be available officially on the band's website, label's website or MySpace. This is an attempt to keep readers up to date with a band's crowd favorite so they can sing along at a show.
Other general posts include:
Show reviews: talking about the show not by a technical point, but noting the emotional peaks of the show. Posts will include information about upcoming tour dates, photos from the show and several mp3s. Unlike casual point and shoot snapshots of a show many see on most music blog posts, camera crowd is after all run by two avid photographers and there are always the "for more photos" linking to their Flickrs at the end of the posts.
Playlists: mostly with a holiday theme or season. The playlist will always be up for streaming on a flash player.
Beneath the header of the blog is an announcements section titled pass it on.This contains short updates on Camera Crowd's favorite bands and news readers ought to know and pass on. It also gives a reminder to readers of what kind of posts will be up soon and to tell them if Anne or Charlie is attending a show that night.
Readers will find that some posts will have a yellow infinity sign on the top right-hand corner. These are the posts that will always have the mp3s available to download for readers. The posts without the marker only have the songs available for 7 days. There are many reasons as to why they chose to label posts with the infinity sign.
Camera Crowd is an ad-free blog and relies on YouSendIt to provide downloads and then if the songs are in a post that has the marker on it, the songs will then be re-uploaded to SendSpace. It is impossible to make every song on the blog always available to readers. The marker is to point out the best posts on the blog, best bands that were introduced. It's also the best way for people who are new to Camera Crowd is to read these posts, they can find all the posts with the marker by clicking on the posts' tag, infinite. The main reason why there is a marker in the first place is to make sure that these posts are always available to readers, because the bands and or artists are important and not to be missed.
For the photography part of the blog readers can access the Camera Crowd photoblog by clicking on one of the thumbnails on the right of the music blog page or directly here [7] The photoblog features three contributing photographers from all over the globe and every few months Camera Crowd begins accepting applications again for a new batch of photographers. Other than the rotating three photographers, Anne and Charlie post photos on the blog.
Past guest photographers include:
There are plans to further branch out the photography part of the blog and will be announced sometime this summer.
In the end, this is a relatively young blog run by youngsters, but their love for music and photography cannot be doubted. They welcome CDs, demos and anything that will help the blog run, go to the music blog for the email address.