The Chronicles© – No Equal Since 2008 | www.stickydiljoe.com

I sit here and just think about all the photos that weren’t taken this year at Wekfest East. It’s been days and I’m still annoyed with myself, lol. But it is one of those things that I can’t really go back and change so I’ll just have to make adjustments going forward. People have offered to second-shoot for me and get coverage when I can’t but I just prefer to have my own photos on my site. I’ve had guest photographers in the past, albeit sparingly, but I feel like the site has such a consistent look over the years that I don’t want to change that. I also don’t feel like enthusiasts who have their cars captured would have that same feeling had it been shot by someone else. I don’t say that to sound cocky or anything, I just think people want their cars on this site shot by me and me alone. We are both of the understanding that this site represents my body of work and if they want to be a part of that body of work, it has to be captured authentically by me. I think the big issue now is that I’m so obsessed with getting video and capturing b-roll that it does eat up a lot of my time in the mornings. We also changed the format of how people roll-in this year too so it took some adjusting on my end to figure out where everyone was. I don’t want to keep going on about it so I’ll stop here, but I sincerely apologize for the lack of coverage. I know that people were excited to see what was out there after I was gone for so long and wanted to see a lot of photos. Trust me, I’m working on something that will help me cast a brighter spotlight on the East Coast car community. Just stick with me and understand that I’m doing my best over here…

I suppose there’s a lot I can say about this trip. There was one very obvious incident that happened AFTER that put a negative light on an otherwise incredibly positive day, so I’d rather focus on that. It had felt like forever since we had returned to the East Coast for Wekfest. When it came time for us to finally go back, admittedly, I felt a bit anxious about it. It’s such a contentious region for car shows. There’s so much pride that exists within the car community there, especially considering the people who are hosting an event there are from the ‘other’ side of the country. In the past, I’ve always felt like I had to prepare for a fight (not a literal one of course) every time I went back there. Like people are looking for reasons to tell you why their car is good and why you’re wrong about choosing someone else at a car show. It’s stressful because getting all the judging done in time before the show ends is always a task. Everybody wants their 5-10 minutes (often times longer) to talk to you. Sometimes they’ll go even longer. In a show that has say, 300 cars, and 60% of them are Hondas, time management becomes an issue. 180 of those cars are Hondas. If all 60% of those Honda-owners in there try to tell me about their builds and they have 5 minutes each, that adds up to about 15 hours of people trying to tell me about their builds—The show is only 5 hours long, mind you. That’s a lot of numbers and it gets confusing, but all you need to know is that I don’t have enough time. I love the enthusiasm but it’s a high-stress environment for me. Thankfully most of those enthusiasts there have learned over the years of us being there that I generally know what the fuck I am doing and what the fuck I am looking at. So they leave me be. But, it took some time for them to understand. If you were at the show that weekend and you saw me running around like a crazy person. That’s because I was running around like a fucking crazy person. Somewhere in-between there I managed to find time to eat a sandwich but that’s about it…