T in the Park is one of my favourite festivals - it’s essentially the Atkins diet of festivals. All meat and no veg. Then again, not sure what you’d expect to be healthy about putting 70,000 people in a field with ample supplies of Tennants and not enough sun cream.
In between shooting around 4,000 frames on my dSLRs I managed to grab a few highlight shots with the Samsung compact I’m using at present.
For anyone who has ever travelled up the east coast mainline to Scotland, you’ll appreciate how beautiful many of the views are along the way. This shot was taken from the train window as we passed through Berwick.
But onto the festival and yes - it was sunny! I did some shots of White Lies from the side of stage and while I was there grabbed this frame with the compact - it coped surprisingly well with the level of sunlight, which at some points just left me with white skies in my shots. Being on stage is one of the best buzzes you can get as a music photographer and a real highlight of T was shooting the Killers from the side of stage. You can see a shot of that here.
But it’s not all about big bands and fireworks - festival season is a great time to catch bands you’ve never seen and enjoy a more intimate experience than being squashed between tens of thousands of sweaty revellers. Here I caught a band called The Answering Machine from Manchester - really catchy pop tunes and great stage presence, if you havent heard them have a listen.
Now, this has nothing whatsoever to do with music but it did seem like something I should blog. Never have I ever before come across ‘Roasted Coconut Juice’ in a can - and before you claim i’m making it up, I took a quick photo to prove its existence.
But, like a good can of Roasted Coconut Juice, T had to come to an end and it very nearly had a messy one. I arrived in the photo pit at 7pm for Snow Patrol, who were due to play before Blur. We were then told that Graham Coxon was in hospital, and that Snow Patrol would play at 7.30. Then, at 7.25, it was announced Snow Patrol would in fact go on at 8pm. At this point rumours of Blur cancelling were flying around - not good. After playing for nearly 2 hours (at one point i genuinely thought they might start taking requests they were going on for so long!) they finished up, and we were told blur would play at 10pm. Sure enough they made it, and the festival had its closing headliner. I nipped out into the crowd after I’d done my edit and grabbed this over everyone’s heads at the end of an epic ‘The Universal’
And this is a picture of a castle, taken some time on Monday morning. I don’t remember when exactly, or indeed actually taking it, because I’d gone for a walk after quite alot to drink. But as random photos go, I was quite pleased to wake up with this on my camera.
Next festival is V, or possibly Kendal Calling, but I might go mad and even do a blog about something non-music related in the mean time!
