Lately I’ve posted a lot of festival and event pictures…I guess I’ve gone to a few of those here at the tail end of summer. It’s fun to shoot at these events, and for a street photographer it’s “easy pickings” when people come to these events in (hopefully) large crowds. You have so many potential images walk right by you that it’s hard not to shoot A LOT. Of course that will come back to bite you in the rear end sometimes (case in point: my 700 raw images from the Landskrona Carnival a few weeks ago), so a happy medium point between frugal shooting and “spray and pray” is definitely desirable!
This weekend was quite full of photography for me. I’ll probably get to the Sunday photowalk in my next blogpost since I shot analog only and haven’t gotten around to developing the films. So, I’ll talk about the Saturday activities in this post.
My four students after we finished our impromptu analog photowalk in the park
In the morning I taught the first part of the fall 2019 edition of my photo club’s analog introduction class. Four willing victims (students…I meant students!) showed up and after a bit of photographic theory covering the exposure triangle (ISO, aperture and time) and other things we loaded up their cameras with fresh film and headed out into the nearby park to experiment. I think everyone learned at least a few things and hopefully there’ll be photos on their film strips when we do the developing next weekend!
After that (and a healthy refueling on a falafel) I took a short bus ride over to the Norra Grängesbergsgatan street festival. It’s a local street festival I’ve heard about before and thought it’d be cool to shoot at (I think this was the 4th year they put this on), but this was my first opportunity to go. Basically it’s a lot of different groups and organizations related to cultural events and many bands and performers that put together a lot of stages and dance “clubs” and many other types of activities for a whole day’s worth of events, often staged in places usually equipped for other things, like a carwash or auto body repair shop to name just a few.
The dancing fever has clearly struck these Swedes!
As soon as I got off the bus about half a block from the event I could hear the heavy bass of reggae music, so it was pretty easy to find where it was. When I walked back and forth between the two shipping containers at each end of the street blocking off regular traffic I could hear latino rhythms, punk, 80s synth music, drum n’ bass and several other genres I wouldn’t know how to describe.
The cacophony was a bit overwhelming to be honest and it was a good thing I had a set of earplugs in my photo bag. I was glad to see that so many of the kids enjoying the music were wearing hearing protection, because some bands and DJs were definitely cranking those PAs WAY too high in my opinion! That could of course be my “old man complaining” kicking in, but I don’t think so. A friend of mine who tried to sell stuff at the flea market didn’t exactly appreciate that there was a very loud stage right next to the flea market area, making any talk about their products a shouting game and not very conducive to successful business!
Good thing this kid’s ears (like many others her age) are safe at the festival!
I’ve never been able to understand why you bring dogs with their sensitive hearing to loud events like this one. Boggles my blond brain cell! I saw several canines there who were very uncomfortable and jumpy with each drum beat blaring at them. :-(