Hi,
Many years ago, not long after the dinosaurs had walked the earth I had a camera, eventually I progressed on to a Pentax Z10 35mm camera, I took lots of photos, I got fed up with paying a fortune to get things developed and gave up, sold my kit and stopped.
Many years later I got hold of a HP 2mp point and shoot and the last spark of interest was rekindled into a small flame. It was a decent enough camera, fairly rugged and reasonably competent if you wanted snaps.
So my interest was re-born. a year or so later I ended up with a Konica - Minolta Z2, another 4mp hyper zoom camera, again good at what it did. BUT at this point my wife (then girlfriend), working for a local paper, discovered that a number of local music festivals were being run and that her paper was ignoring them, no interest and little coverage. What she needed was a partner who was daft enough to spend days in a damp field with her, was technically savvy and could, on occasion, take a decent photo.
Due to a massive lack of interest I was volunteered.
In 2008 we covered our first ever music festival, we paid for tickets and a hotel room, we had only our personal equipment and no idea what we were doing. I have unfortunately lost these photos over the years (probably just as well) we also covered a local Blues festival. Organisers, bands and guests were amazed at what we managed to achieve, we put up photos onto the papers website on the same day, a rolling post of the days events and activities was carried out updated at least hourly and generated over 6000 hits in a day (we had no facebook at the time or twitter, social media hadn't really bitten, YET).
The Blues festival proved without a doubt that the cameras weren't up to the challenge, in any way, and certainly could not handle low lighting in a marquee. We upgraded, a Casio Z1000 and Fuji S8000 added to the collection and mini DV video cameras added in to the kit (Ebay is a wonderful thing), results improved -
So quality improved, but in reality although we were doing something much appreciated by the festival organisers we still had no real idea what we were up to, we tried to get every local band playing during the festival, one had 7 stages over 3 days and most of the bands were local, it was exhausting but very good practise. We were so new to this that the photos pretty much went up as was, video was a nightmare uploading to PC and editing for some wobbly shaky results. However by now people knew who we were, bands really liked our stuff and photos started to appear on Myspace (you may need to google it LOL)
There was a step change in the offing, again thanks to ebay, find out where we went from there in part 2
Many years ago, not long after the dinosaurs had walked the earth I had a camera, eventually I progressed on to a Pentax Z10 35mm camera, I took lots of photos, I got fed up with paying a fortune to get things developed and gave up, sold my kit and stopped.
Many years later I got hold of a HP 2mp point and shoot and the last spark of interest was rekindled into a small flame. It was a decent enough camera, fairly rugged and reasonably competent if you wanted snaps.
So my interest was re-born. a year or so later I ended up with a Konica - Minolta Z2, another 4mp hyper zoom camera, again good at what it did. BUT at this point my wife (then girlfriend), working for a local paper, discovered that a number of local music festivals were being run and that her paper was ignoring them, no interest and little coverage. What she needed was a partner who was daft enough to spend days in a damp field with her, was technically savvy and could, on occasion, take a decent photo.
Due to a massive lack of interest I was volunteered.
In 2008 we covered our first ever music festival, we paid for tickets and a hotel room, we had only our personal equipment and no idea what we were doing. I have unfortunately lost these photos over the years (probably just as well) we also covered a local Blues festival. Organisers, bands and guests were amazed at what we managed to achieve, we put up photos onto the papers website on the same day, a rolling post of the days events and activities was carried out updated at least hourly and generated over 6000 hits in a day (we had no facebook at the time or twitter, social media hadn't really bitten, YET).
The Blues festival proved without a doubt that the cameras weren't up to the challenge, in any way, and certainly could not handle low lighting in a marquee. We upgraded, a Casio Z1000 and Fuji S8000 added to the collection and mini DV video cameras added in to the kit (Ebay is a wonderful thing), results improved -
So quality improved, but in reality although we were doing something much appreciated by the festival organisers we still had no real idea what we were up to, we tried to get every local band playing during the festival, one had 7 stages over 3 days and most of the bands were local, it was exhausting but very good practise. We were so new to this that the photos pretty much went up as was, video was a nightmare uploading to PC and editing for some wobbly shaky results. However by now people knew who we were, bands really liked our stuff and photos started to appear on Myspace (you may need to google it LOL)
There was a step change in the offing, again thanks to ebay, find out where we went from there in part 2