JunkedCamera.com is gone. Long gone. And its not coming back. Well its still there, it just isn’t maintained. Brian and I had long said that it may make a return appearance at some point, but I think by now we both knwo its not going to happen. Brian is still shooting a good deal, but not shows anymore, and I rarely touch my camera anymore. That is not something I am happy about. I do plan to start shooting sometime again, and hopefully in the near future, I just don’t know what the subject will be. But I digress, this is to be about the long forgotten website that still costs $9 a month in hosting, although I have tacked a few other websites onto the hosting plan.
I suppose the biggest strength and weakness of the site, is that we could never really tell you what it was. But I can tell you what it did. First and foremost it cost us a minimum of one semester at school -probably more if you ask either of us in a private setting. It cost us thousand of dollars in concert tickets, fast food, gas, speeding tickets, camera equipment, coffee, etc… It never really made us any money. It got us in to numerous shows free of charge. It took us all over the continent, from Toronto to Montreal, to Burlington (VT), to Syracuse, to Rochester, to New Hampshire for some insane reason. Most of those shows were return trips. 10 hours of driving in a single night wasn’t out of the question. It got us free CDs, and on one occasion a trip to Universal Records office in Toronto to pick up tickets (free) and some swag (also free). That was cool. It got us recognized in places we shouldn’t have been known -like having 13 year old girls ask if we were from JunkedCamera. We never spoke to them long, because that could send us to jail. It got our photos printed in magazines, magazine covers, ads, online articles, CD jackets, and probably some other places that I don’t know about. Did I mention we never really made any money off it? But we did get lots of free CDs. It gave us an excuse to see most of our favorite bands, and even more that we disliked, and it generally gave us an excuse to act important.
With everything that it did, we never really knew what it was. It started off as a photo journal of sorts, but never really fell into the photo blog world. It was somewhat more journalistic than that. It did gain reviews at some point, which were crudely written and were basically a way for us to gush about bands we liked, and more importantly rip on bands we hated. More than anything they were a pain in the ass that frequently cause us to delay posting photos. I guess if anything it was a photo gallery of a huge number of bands. We had many offers to have others shoot for it, but we always declined. It was more personal than that, but again, not into the blog territory, because that would have precluded us from seeing bands we didn’t want to see, which we did on frequent occasions. I guess more than anything it was something cool to do, and a fun way to document the idiocy.
At some points it was quite popular. 1000 unique visitors per day wasn’t out of the question. Anyway, it was very fun for a few years, and I can’t say I’m happy its gone, well maybe I am, but I wish I had something to take its place.
Some -and certainly not all- of my favorite photos (I’ll leave out my favorite of Brian’s photos because I am sure they would differ from his opinions):
