This Is Not A Photo Opportunity

Parklife 2012 @ The Botanic Gardens, 29.09.2012 – Quick Round Up

It’s been a quiet few months post-Rave. Truth be told, I have been away from Brisbane for a large proportion of the last two months, with work taking me down to Canberra and Sydney before a four week stint in Victoria. I did go to a few gigs while in Melbourne but one was Patrick Wolf at The Forum, so I didn’t even think about taking a camera, and Slug Guts and Book of Ships were both at The Gasometer which has to be one of the worst lit venues I’ve ever been in. Having said that, Slug Guts did play in the dark and the lighting was a considerable improvement for the Book of Ships show the next week. If I’d known I would have taken my camera but had been put off after my first experience. I managed to squeeze in a weekend back in Brisbane and also went to see Patrick Wolf at The Tivoli. Being my first time back there since Rave closed, it made me miss the day-to-day, week-to-week photographing around Brisbane more than ever.

Once again Parklife marks the start of the festival season and the opportunity to go and take some photos. I was really looking forward to the line-up announcement and fairly disappointed when it was released as I didn’t think it was anywhere near as good as the last few years. It also looked like it had been downscaled with less live acts and the loss of the stage where the smaller live acts played. However, despite those disappointments, it had a degree of excitement in being the first time I’d photographed with the benefit of a photo pit in more than two months.

My day looked like the map below (although I did forget to start the tracker until I was already in a photo pit photographing the first band of the day).

View 29/09/2012 12:22pm in a larger map

The stats were as follows:

Total Distance 13.77 km
Total Time: 9:07:33
Average Speed: 1.51 km/h
Max Speed: 12.89 km/h

As I’ve blogged before, I enjoy Parklife and look forward to photographing it.

It’s a fun day out of people watching, with plenty of meatheads on steroids to laugh at and bad tattoos to admire. It’s also interesting to see the year-on-year changes. This year I think I saw more female arse cheeks, due to far-too-short short shorts, in the first few of hours than I might have seen in the previous 40 years I’ve been on the planet. Leg tattoos are a big thing this year, both in terms of small tattoos and text on the back of the legs as well as really big leg pieces. Sometimes I think I should just ditch the bands and take photos of tattoos. The next evolutionary step for the guys is their discovery of fake tan to go with their muscles. So many orange muscle junkies on display this year. It’s also funny to look at the gangs of guys without shirts and notice that every group has a runt of the litter; a guy with his shirt off but who’s obviously not as much into body building/steroids as his mates,

I’ve never experienced any problems at Parklife. It’s never been anything like the eye opener that Future Music was earlier in the year. I think keeping on the move helps avoid any confrontation and this year I had ear plugs in for a lot of the day which blocked out a lot of the background noise to the point of eeriness: walking around a festival with 20,000 people and yet it being fairly quiet.

Highlights of the day were Robyn (they really did save the best ’til last), Chairlift and Passion Pit. I quite enjoyed Wiley as well. I would have liked to have seen more of The Presets but with them starting only 15 minutes before Robyn, with Robyn being so enjoyable and with not wanting another return hike to the Sahara Stage (the Riverstage), I stayed at The Atoll Stage to see more of her set. It’s sad to say but another highlight was the VIP Garden Bar. Unlike any other festival VIP bar I’ve ever been it was fairly quiet and a nice spot to have a sit down and some quiet time away from the masses.

Lowlights of the day were Riverfire and my camera. Despite living by the river for over four years, I’d never been into the city for Riverfire and so was amazed at just what a rubbish fireworks display it is. The more I use my camera the more I don’t like it and the more I miss my old camera. I don’t know why but I’m struggling to get sharp images. With my old camera I could get sharp images at ridiculously low shutter speeds and just can’t get anywhere near that these days. Also I just can’t get used to the EVF and photographing at night does it no favours. When it comes down to it, I just don’t think the Sony A77 is a low light camera, which is an ominous thought considering that’s what I use it for the majority of the time. I might look to get my two main lenses calibrated (as I’ve never had either of them done) to see if that makes any difference. If that doesn’t improve things then I don’t know what the next step is. Possibly a very expensive one.

When I have some more time I’ll put together a proper post of thoughts and photos.  Until then there’s a gallery on The Vine.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012 at 10:09 am. It is filed under Music Photography and tagged with 2012, Alison Wonderland, Botanic Gardens, Brisbane, Chairlift, Charli XCX, Chiddy Bang, Citizens!, Flume, Hermitude, NEro, Parklife, Parklife2012, Passion Pit, Plan B, Riverstage, Rizzle Kicks, Robyn, St Lucia, Tame Impala, The Belligerents, The Presets, Wiley. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.