Diary

There were a few bands playing on the second day of Beautiful Days that I was particularly looking forward to.  Three Daft Monkeys, Seth Lakeman, Arthur Brown and the brilliant Bellowhead were performing in the Big Top, while the Main Stage was to be playing host to British Sea Power, classic 80s rockers New Model Army, and James.  Tim Booth, of James, is a very interesting and exuberant performer, so I was looking forward to getting pictures of him, and I’m happy with any excuse to see Seth Lakeman, especially close enough to take pictures.

Seth Lakeman

New Model Army

And the Main Stage headline act from the second day of the festival – James (pictured – Tim Booth)

One of the things that I enjoy about festivals, is the contact with other photographers. Usually, you’re in, you shoot the first three songs, and then you’re out, and unless it’s a band you like and you hang around to watch them, you head off to process the pictures from the evening. At a festival, everybody’s settled in for the duration, so once you’ve shot the start of a band’s performance, there’s a fair bit of time before the next photo opportunity to have a chat with the people you share that hallowed area at the front of the stage with. There were a few people that I recognised from last year’s festival this year, and a couple of new faces too. In the comparative quiet of the backstage area, a few of us got chatting about what kit we’re using. It wasn’t a competition, and there was no “my lens is bigger than yours” one-upmanship, it was a genuine exchange of ideas, approaches, and attitudes towards our craft.

So we discussed our preferred “festival” kit bags. Last year was my first festival, and I brought way too much stuff with me. Luckily, I don’t camp at Beautiful Days, I have a convenient off-site bolt-hole where I can store spare kit, charge batteries, have a shower, use a real toilet, that kind of thing, so it didn’t matter too much, but there was still plenty of stuff that I took with me that didn’t get used. This year, I learned from that and thinned down my bag a fair bit.

Earplugs – absolutely essential for shooting live bands. It’s extremely noisy at the front of the stage, and certainly at Beautiful Days, security won’t let you around the stage if you don’t have them. I’ve always struggled with those foam ones that you squidge down and then push into your ear, but I recently decided to splash out, and bought some of the decent ones that are designed specially for musicians. They’re those silicon “mushroom” type plugs, and they have interchangeable filters to attenuate different frequencies of sound by differing amounts. I was quite impressed – with the plugs in I could still have a conversation, and I could hear all of the music clearly but at the end of each day there was no ringing or buzzing in my ears. Plus they live in a neat little key-ring cannister that I can hang round my neck right along with my backstage pass and my “Spudz” lens cloth.

Rain-cover – one for me, and one for the camera. Typically, the small one that covers the camera cost a lot more than the big one that covers me! It’s allowed me to keep the camera out of the bag on a fair few occasions when rain would normally stop play.

Camera body, and one lens – Yep, just one lens. When I checked through the pictures from my first festival, I found that despite using two different lenses, the best images were all taken using a fairly narrow range of focal lengths. The Canon 24-70 f2.8 L lens is now my weapon-of-choice for live bands and festival work. The constant f2.8 aperture is great for low light, and the clarity and sharpness of the lens is just brilliant. The zoom range is perfect for the way I like to shoot – from the photographers’ pit, 24mm is wide enough that the I can get a good shot across the whole stage, and 70mm is plenty of zoom for close-ups.

Speedlight, diffuser and ETTL cable – Flash isn’t allowed when you shoot the bands (even though the audience with their compacts standing right behind you are flashing away), but for general shots around the festival site a little fill-flash comes in pretty handy.

Batteries, charger, and spare memory cards – that little lot goes without saying! Staying off the festival site means that I can charge batteries each night, and empty the contents of my memory cards onto the laptop, and start each day nice and fresh.

And that was pretty much it.

Coming soon – The final day of Beautiful Days 2010 – I eat the best mashed potato ever, get completely soaked, and have the joys of a really good cup of tea explained to me by Billy Bragg.

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….

Well, the first version of the new-look website is up and running, with the first gallery of pictures for you to look at.  The gallery is just a small selection of the pictures I took at the fantastic ATOM Live! event at the O2 Academy in Bristol a couple of weeks ago.  Five locally-based (Bristol) bands played alongside a touring band from Norwich.  The standard of all six performances was really high, and I was very grateful to have been invited along to take pictures.

As well as shooting the performances, I managed to get a few minutes with most of the bands backstage, and shot a handful of posed pictures, which I hope some of them will want to use for their own promotional material.  One of the bands, Punch Drunk (who were awesome on-stage, and really nice off-stage, just like the rest of the bands) were a bit rushed though, I didn’t get to shoot them until they’d finished playing, so they were naturally a bit hot, and there was only a short gap until the next band played, so I’m arranging to meet up with them sometime in the near future, to do a proper session with them so they have some really good pictures for their website and stuff.

Shooting bands is definitely a lot of fun – especially for me as an occasional musician, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to build on the experience from ATOM Live and do more work in that particular field.  And you never know – one day soon when one or more of the six bands is hugely famous, I might get to take pictures of them again.

Welcome to the North Somerset Photography blog. Here you’ll be able to find out what I’ve been up to lately (in the world of photography, that is – if you want juicy personal details you’ll have to wait for my autobiography to be published!), and possibly what I’m planning to get up to in the near future.

Take care,

Russ.