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It's my first time posting here on Daily Beat, but I've been lurking around in featured images from Salute. and Flume or my photographic work for Beacon Records artist Commandah Panda.  I do mostly fashion photography but recently I got into shooting events. Last month I shot Kendrick Lamar and Dr. Dre for Beats By Dre...still can't get over it, so surreal.  Anyway, at the beginning of August I visited India--Kashmir, Jaipur, Agra and Delhi...it was really a photographer's dream.  A week later I travelled to the bay area, Florida and Rhode Island to visit family before school starts in Boston. Here's a recap of the month that just past, and my hand-selected top ten photos that I shot. Enjoy!

Kendrick Lamar is a student of hip-hop history. He looked at the state of hip-hop in 2013, and realized that there’s no tension. Everyone’s too buddy-buddy and too willing to stay in their own corner. So Kendrick Lamar shook up the game. By calling out a huge group of his peers on “Control” (including Big Sean on his own song), K-Dot is trying to bring out the best in everyone else. He figured that the best way to see everyone’s A-game was to go right at them, so that’s exactly what he did. The only question now is, who’s going to respond? The answer is, several rappers already have (though none of them were name-dropped by Kendrick in his verse).

Seven years ago, Nas released a record called Hip Hop Is Dead. Many hip-hop die-hards, including my colleague Reuben Friedman, hold the same opinion and I agree for the most part. However, with the recent mainstream success of Kendrick Lamar and Macklemore and the emergence of young bucks like Joey Bada$$, things seem to be looking up. To me, the state of hip-hop is like the U.S. economy: things aren’t that great right now, but they sure as hell are better than the way they were five years ago. But in order for hip-hop to reach that same level that it was 15-20 years ago, there are certain people who need to change their ways or just disappear all together. Now, if there’s one thing in this world that I absolutely hate with every ounce of my being, it’s ignorance. And as an African-American, nothing pisses me off more than grown-ass black men being ignorant, so this issue is one of personal importance for me.

This particular topic is one that I've heard quite a few people talking about over the past few months. With the exception of Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore has been the hottest thing in hip-hop since he and his DJ/producer Ryan Lewis released their debut album as a pair, The Heist. What's especially surprising is the fact he actually makes good music. If you told me this would be the case just 1 year [...]