Brynn Michaels In A Minivan

March 11, 2025

Back in January I was in New York for this big charity event I help run every year and I needed to rent a minivan for it. I was only gonna be in Brooklyn for one night before heading to New Jersey for the event (and my friend’s 40th birthday party which he held at an NJ mall for some insane reason). I don’t have any models to photograph in North Carolina for some reason, so I hit up a few people in NYC to see if they wanted to shoot. My pal Brynn Michaels was down but had dinner plans. My flight was delayed and by the time I would get back to my place it was going to be too dark, but I had an idea. I would drive directly to her from the rental car place, and we would shoot in the minivan.

If you are a long time reader of this blog you might notice that I don’t use studio lighting and I don’t use flash very often for my portrait work, so when I got to Brynn’s and turned on just the car lights I was deeply concerned at how dark it was in the van. I knew I could take some flash photos, but it was too dark to do anything else. Fortunately Brynn had a little mini video light and we shot the whole thing with that. It turned out it was absolutely perfect for the job. I have nearly the same light and I normally bring it with me as a backup for exact situations like this but I didn’t think I was going to have time to photograph anyone since I only had that night. Luckily it all worked out.

I ended up really loving these photos and glad I could get Brynn some photos she likes as well. This is the third time we have worked together and the second time I managed to delete the photos off my memory card before backing them up. That is literally the only time I have ever done that in the 24 years that I have owned a digital camera. So I owed her some good photos… I should mention, just as a quick aside, that Brynn was still healing from a breast augmentation so she’s got some red scars that are healed now. I don’t edit scars and blemishes because I like to think of myself as a documentary photographer, even when I am shooting nudes in the back of a minivan. Luckily Brynn respects my dumb vision and is letting me post all the photos unedited so shout out to her for that. Personally scars and blemishes just make photos feel more real/raw to me and I think that’s what a lot of you guy appreciate about my work too.

Anyway, while I was photographing Brynn I heard back from another one of the models I had hit up. I had mentioned the minivan to my friend Gia as well and she was down. She met up with me at my Brooklyn space right as I was parking. I knew it was going to be too dark in the van and I didn’t have a light for this shoot. We took a few photos at my spot but honestly the lighting there sucks so much I don’t even want to post those photos. We tried to shoot in the van after that and it really was too dark, but we tried. At the end I just used my iPhone light and those came out okay so I probably should have done more than that. After brightening them as much as I could in Lightroom, I ended up with 14 decent photos in the minvian that I uploaded as a little bonus.

So, as we move forward with this new site, all the NSFW images are going to be exclusively on Girls Of Driven By Boredom. This site is just going to have previews of shoots and then you can pay a few bucks a month to see the other shots. Fortunately Girls of DBB has tens of thousands of images on there. Everything that has been deleted from this site is still there, behind a paywall. Sorry, but blame the US government for the FOSTA/SESTA bill.

So click over to Girls of DBB for 55 minivan photos of Brynn, 14 minvan photos of Gia. They each have another full shoot on there as well. In the meantime you can check out this preview gallery below…

PS. I there’s also a 2 minute long video I shot of Brynn in the minivan. You can buy that alacarte without signing up Girls of DBB, but it’s free for members.

The Night Michael Jackson Died – 6.25.09

March 6, 2025March 6, 2025

I don’t have a great system for how reuploading old content is going to work. Unless someone pays me to dig up a specific event, so far the idea is just to open a random folder and see what’s inside and if it’s good, post it. For this first ever Vintage DBB post I decided to dig into the 2009 folder because that’s the earliest time period when I thought my event photography was actually good. I have a ton of earlier photos that I will post eventually, but I figured we should start out with some technically sound photos. The first folder I opened was today’s date, but it was sort of an atypical night, so I picked a date randomly, 6.25.09. Until I opened the folder, I had forgotten that I have that exact date tattooed to my leg.

It turns out, 6.25.09 was the day Michael Jackson died. Now it’s pretty clear at this point that he was a monster, but when he died Leaving Neverland hadn’t come out and while there were allegations, I still loved his music, not enough to get a tattoo of him, but he was the first artist I ever listened to that wasn’t forced on me by my parents. Thriller was the first album I ever owned. When he died it didn’t really have any impact on me, I don’t really like any of his music written since 1987 and it’s not like he was putting out new stuff. But for some reason I just though it would be funny if I got a Michael Jackson tattoo that day. I was kinda joking about it, but when a friend from the NY Post hit me up asking me if I knew of any memorial parties she could cover, I told her I might get a tattoo and she told me she would cover it if I got it, and suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke anymore. I went over to Fine Line Tattoo and got a dumb Michael Jackson tattoo while a photographer and writer from the NY Post watched. They never ran the story…

After I got tattooed I went over to Anchor bar because my friend Josh, aka The Fat Jew, hired me to shoot a party he was throwing. Kid Cudi was there for some reason. I don’t even remember what the party was exactly, and honestly what I wrote at the time gives me no additional information. I do remember that he never paid me, but we made it square when I had him play santa for my Christmas card that year. In my post at the time I said I didn’t really know anyone at the party, but I found a bad photo of my friend SERF before I knew him and a few photos of my buddy SAME who we lost back in 2020. Going back through my archives I keep finding photos of friends before I met them, and photos of way too many friends who are no longer with us.

Speaking of no longer with us, after Anchor Bar I went over to Lit Lounge and the very first person I photographed there was my old friend and roommate Alex Magnetic. Alex was one of my all time favorite humans and was living with me when she died. Her death impacted my life in such a profound way and it was just a few months before the pandemic, which also altered my life in such a profound way. I feel like I am an old man now and I didn’t feel that way before she died. I think her death was the official end of my youth, even though I was 39 at the time.

I don’t have a ton of shots from Lit. I think it was for the party NC-17, but not 100% sure. Jeremy Bastard was DJing, but maybe it was just a special MJ night or something. My blog gives no indication. The only real thing of note that night was that I went home with twin sisters, and when I say I went home with them, I just mean they crashed at my place so they didn’t have to drive to New Jersey or wherever they lived. What’s wild is that forever I had one of their bracelets in a bedside table drawer, hoping that I would figure out who left it there. Well 16 years later I finally figure it out but I finally threw it away when I moved, and I am not in contact with those girls anymore.

Lastly, I should mention that future throwback posts probably won’t be this long, but I just felt inspired since it’s the first post and I had a lot to say, but I am excited to go back and tell old stories and relive some of these memories. Also, I should mention that I registered vintagedbb.com which will just redirect to the Vintage DBB posts on website, in case you ever want to see what new old stuff I have posted. You can also check the @vintagedbb Instagram account as well. Now go check out the photos from the night Michael Jackson died below.

Welcome To Driven By Boredom 4.0

February 27, 2025March 1, 2025

24 years ago today Driven By Boredom 1.0 was born in a Penn State dorm room. I hated the frat party scene there and spent most of my time talking to my friends back in DC on AOL Instant Messenger. I was bored out of my mind, but I had broadband internet and too much creativity with no outlet. I needed a place to post my photos and weird projects I was working on long before sites like Flickr and YouTube existed. On March 1st, 2001 Driven By Boredom went live and it changed my life forever.

Never in a million years did I think I would still be blogging nearly a quarter of a century later. I have run this site for more than half my life and it’s been my full time career since 2008. There’s no chance I would have made it as a photographer without this site, but this site has not always been a photoblog.

Driven By Boredom 1.0 – 2001 – 2005:
The original site was just whatever I wanted it to be. I would post my photography of course, but it was so much more. It was a journal where I would would deeply overshare on the internet long before that was a thing that people were doing. I would post weird internet projects I was working on, memes, links to sites I found interesting, weird videos and whatever I could think of. After I left Penn State and went to art school I started managing a band called the Gaskets and for the last couple of years of DBB 1.0 it was really just a blog about that band with some occasional photos thrown in for good measure.

Driven By Boredom 2.0 – 2005 – 2006:
I am certain Driven By Boredom 2.0 didn’t even last a year. It might not have lasted 10 posts. The original site had become such a huge pain to update that I wanted to try out the new blogging platforms. Blogs were an actual thing at this point and so I let 1.0 languish without updates and launched a Blogger account. I had this idea to review stuff and for a few weeks I was really enjoying how easy it was to update, but I was busy with the band and working shitty temp jobs and taking photos and once again the site languished.

Driven By Boredom 3.0 – 2007 – 2025:
This is the site most people think of when they think about this website. When I moved to NYC in 2006 I was going to parties and taking photos and everyone would ask me where I was posting the photos. I had no plans to actually post any of the photos, I just don’t know how to exist without documenting my life. It was the beginning of the nightlife photo blog era and everyone wanted to see their photos from the night before. I figured I might as well bring Driven By Boredom to life and instead of using the old 1.0 design, I started using WordPress. My friend Adam made me a custom template and suddenly I had a photoblog that I didn’t update again until literally today.

Driven By Boredom 4.0 – 2025 – ???
And here we are starting from scratch again. My old site was so out of date and broken and full of so many people’s regrets that it was time to clear the slate and build something new, while also going back to my roots. I want to blog again, which is why I created B-Sides, I want to post old photos with new context which is why we have a Vintage DBB section, and mostly I want to be able to post photos that actually make sense on modern screens. My galleries actually work now and photos are more than three times bigger now. It’s all really exciting.

I have no idea what the future will hold for this site, no one reads blogs anymore, but I am excited to post old stories and old photos while also moving forward with new images and new stories that reflect my life in 2025 instead of whatever crazy shit I was posting about in my 20s. My life is always changing, and so is this blog. I can’t wait to see what DBB 5.0 looks like…

Vintage Driven By Boredom

February 27, 2025March 1, 2025

If you’ve been paying attention to my social media for the last couple years I have been posting throwback party photos from the “Indie Sleaze” era over on my VintageDBB Instagram account. I’ve been having a ton of fun doing it and part of that has been going back to old parties and finding photos I totally forgot about, sometimes finding photos I never even published because they didn’t seem interesting to me at the time.

Recently I started doing posts that consisted of images from just a single night or event and writing a bit about it in the caption and with the launch of Driven By Boredom 4.0 I want to expand that. As we start from scratch with this website and start moving forward, I also want to be moving backwards by reposting old images with new context, new edits and most importantly larger files without giant watermarks on them. Back in the day I wanted my logo to show up on people’s MySpace Top 8s so I made my logo take up like 15% of the image. I also posted so many terrible photos that I didn’t edit at all and they were all 750px wide which is way too small for modern screens. I still don’t do a lot of editing these days, but at least I am not posting images that are underexposed by three stops.

Going back and doing this is going to be a lot of work for no financial reward so I have come up with a bounty system where people can pay me to see old photos again. For $150 I will track down the party or event you want to see and reupload it in high resolution with new edits and all of that. I am happy to shout you out as well in the post if that’s something you are interested in as well. Perhaps your old band from back then has a new album out and you want a little bonus promotion, I got you. I just need to come up with a way to justify all the time I am going to be spending digging through the archives, and maybe you guys can help. If you want to see an old gallery, just reach out.

Lastly I should mention that one of the reasons that I am starting all over again is because 2025 is not 2007 and I know there are a ton of middle aged people out there who would prefer if there old drunken photos don’t exist anymore. As I reupload old content I am sure I will be unearthing some not so great memories for people and images they wish disappeared with MySpace, so as I go through this stuff I am going to 1) Try and not post the drunkest of photos 2) I will be presenting everything with new context instead of whatever fucked up thing I said about the photos at the time and 3) as always I will be removing any photos that people don’t want up. Again, just reach out. The last thing I want to do is upset anyone. I will be posting some old NSFW content, but all of that will be paywalled, so no one can accidentally stumble on that so if your boss sees it before you can ask me to take it down you can ask him why he’s on my pay site.

We are currently building a private archive of the old site so that I can go back and see what I wrote at the time so I might not start uploading Vintage DBB posts until that is ready to go, but in the meantime go follow VintageDBB on Instagram. See you guys back here soon…

35mm Photo Dump

February 27, 2025March 1, 2025

This is technically the first post of Driven By Boredom 4.0. I need to upload a few posts before the actual introductory post so we have to begin somewhere. I had originally planned on uploading the most recent DBB 3.0 posts to the new site, but I changed my mind. I want to start from scratch, but also I don’t want to drop any new content when the post wouldn’t be featured, so the solution is just a dump of recent 35mm photos.

These photos were taken primarily in December and January and hint at a bunch of projects I am working on. My life has changed quite a bit since moving to North Carolina a year ago, and it’s pretty obvious from the photos. Most of the interesting photos were taken on my two recent trips to NYC, but I moved to the beach so photos taken during the winter here aren’t exactly going to be exciting. Honestly I really like it here, but it is not as inspiring as I would like it to be, which is why I am forcing myself to work on a handful of projects.

Project 1) Photographing strangers. I am trying to force myself to photograph 200 strangers and I am slowly posting them on my 35mm Instagram account. I have been slacking a bit on that one recently, but I hope to start working more on that one as it gets warmer.

Project 2) A photo documentary on a local fiberglass artist named Hubert Graham. I have visited Hubert three times so far and planned on going back a bunch more times. I am such a huge fan of roadside attractions and not only is his place a giant roadside attraction but he’s the person who makes roadside attractions for other people.

Project 3) License plate zine. I am working on a new zine called Vanity that I promise will be more interesting than just photos of vanity plates. That’s my next project after Project 4.

Project 4) Nothing But Flowers. I have been working for nearly a year on a book with a bunch of other people featuring man made structures that have been overtaken by nature. There’s actually no examples of that in this photo dumb, purely because I am done shooting for it. I just need to finish laying out the book and actually publishing it.

Aside from those projects this photo dump has some sports related photos, some mildly NSFW photos, some street/mall photography and even a trip to Medieval Times for my friend’s 40th birthday. It’s all pretty exciting.

Okay, let’s just move on with our lives and test out the new gallery system. I have more posts to write to get ready for the launch of the new site.