Diary

So Friday was the first day of the Beautiful Days festival.  Thanks to a load of stuff I had to do in the morning, I didn’t arrive at the site until halfway through the afternoon, so I missed The Levellers opening proceedings with an acoustic set in the Big Top.  The weather was kind though, and although it wasn’t exactly warm, it did stay mainly dry.  I say “not exactly warm” – it’s surprising just how hot it gets in the photo-pit at the front of the stage, dashing backwards and forwards to get the right position for the best shots, avoiding stepping on other photographers, and making sure you get the shots you want at one side of the stage while keeping an eye on what’s happening on the other side.  And if it’s a band that you know and love, it can be hard to take photos while singing along!

So who was I lucky enough to see on the first day of the festival? Nick Harper (who I should’ve seen before, but somehow haven’t), Duke Special, the utterly brilliant and terrifyingly exuberant Ned’s Atomic Dustbin (just keeping the camera pointing at the lead singer as he bounced around the stage was near impossible!), a much more laid-back Fairport Acoustic Convention, all in the Big Top, and then I headed over to the Main Stage for the day’s headline act – Newton Faulkner.

I’ll admit that I’ve never been overly keen on Newton Faulkner. I think that could be because he seemed to break onto the mainstream music scene at the same time as a whole bunch of other musicians who all seemed to sound very similar and blend into one another. I was converted on Friday night though – I enjoyed his music very much, but his low-key performance (there was just him on the large stage, very carefully lit, with a single chair to sit on, a guitar and its associated bits of kit) was rather engaging.  Here he is in all his ginger, dreadlocked, grinning glory.

Once a year (sometimes twice) I meet up with a bunch of friends that I don’t get to see the rest of the time for a weekend.  We’re pan-European, covering England, Holland and Finland – ok, that’s not massively pan-European, but logistically it means that we can’t all be popping around to each others’ houses for coffee throughout the year.  As with any gathering of friends in the modern age, there are plenty of cameras around, and they get used quite a lot.

I’m notoriously bad at sharing or displaying the “personal” pictures that I take, so this year I took my laptop along with my camera, so that I’d have no excuse for not uploading my images from the weekend during the weekend itself.  It was while I was quickly processing and uploading the pictures that I’d taken, that I realised I can’t make myself take snaps any more.  I can’t turn off my Photographer mode.

I took about 30 pictures (60 by the time I’d spent a few minutes on Sunday in my friends’ garden playing with their dog), and of those 30, about 20 were “keepers” that passed my own standards and made it to an online gallery.  They were all portraits of my friends – of course – and I was pretty pleased with them, but there weren’t any snaps.  I had no spontaneous face-pulling pictures, or pictures of people laughing with wild abandon, or spilling beer on themselves.  It’s kinda hard to get candid pictures of people when you’re sitting a few feet away holding a big SLR with a fat lens and a speedlight.

Taking snaps is a skill I need to rediscover.  Perhaps I should get myself a compact camera and only carry that for a while, forcing myself to use Auto mode and shooting in Jpeg.

Or have I passed a point of no return?   Have I gone through some kind of mental barrier that means that from now on I’ll only ever be able to see the world in terms of what settings, focal length and lighting I’d use to capture what I’m seeing at a specific moment.

I was showing one of my friends the pictures I took at a music festival last year where I had a Photographer pass to the front of the stage area – she asked if I ever feel like I only see things as if they’re through a lens, and although I didn’t at the time, now that I’ve had a chance to think about what she said, I think she could be right.  I’ve got a pass to the same festival again this year – next weekend.  This time, once the first three songs are over and we’re all escorted out of the stage area, the camera’s going back in the bag while I actually stop being a photographer and become a festival-goer, so I can just enjoy the music.

That’s unless I see something that would make a great picture, in which case that camera will come back out again.  Although, that photo-opportunity might not last too long, so perhaps I’d better keep the camera out of the bag after all – just in case.

Oh dear….