***Friday & Saturday, May 30th and 31st, 2025***

Welcome to Swim Into The Sound’s inaugural photography post! If you hadn’t heard, this site just celebrated its tenth birthday, so in a weird way, this feels like the perfect time to start something new. While I’ve been a lifelong music geek, one of my first real hobbies and passions was photography. To date, one of the best days of my life was my sixteenth birthday when my parents got me a fancy-ass DSLR camera to encourage my newfound creative pursuits. While it proved too clumsy and daunting to be carrying around a Canon Rebel at all hours of the day, I’ve always enjoyed composition and the act of capturing something in the moment.

Earlier this year, I bought a tiny little digicam while I was staying in New York, and it reinvigorated me to start snapping photos. Something about the flash and semi-shittiness of the camera makes the images look perpetually trapped in 2013 in a way that I love. Plus, even though this camera is small enough to fit in my pocket, something about it feels more authentic than taking another low-light photo on my iPhone.

I brought the camera with me to Liberation Weekend in DC, attempting to capture as many of the performances, merch spreads, and vibes as I could. While I was learning a lot on the fly, I took a ton of pictures that I’m extremely proud of. Since the main blog isn’t really set up for long scrolls of photos, I wanted to create this dedicated section of the site to showcase my photography in a more direct way. Rather than a clunky in-article gallery or cluster of images, these pictures will all be laid out directly in the post, easy to save, and (when appropriate) annotated with any relevant captions. I also have a tendency to grab environmental pictures just to illustrate the scene beyond the stage, so you’ll probably see some of those sprinkled in.

Pivoting to photography isn’t what I expected for myself or this blog, but I hope it feels like it all fits under the same holistic mission of documenting good music as it happens in real time. Without further ado, please enjoy these photos of Liberation Weekend, and if you haven’t already, be sure to read the accompanying article by Caro and me.