BC Festival 150 Recap

This morning we woke up at 6am in order to catch the 8am ferry back to Vancouver. I don’t think my head hit the pillow until around 1am, so needless to say I was pretty exhausted this morning. I’ve been trying to watch my caffeine intake over the last few weeks, and I definitely had a bunch this weekend. So even though I’m really beat today, I’m trying hard to not have any more caffeine.

In terms of the concert, it was easily one of the best events I’ve been to in a very long time. We spent most of yesterday bouncing between watching concerts, walking around in the sun, and sampling beer in the beer gardens. Our press access got us into a little press area about 10 feet from the stage. For most of the shows we were only allowed to stay for three songs, and then had to leave. But once Sarah McLachlan came on, I think they realized it would be too hard to keep people from listening, and we set up shop on a little piece of grass not far from center stage.

The big surprise of the show for me was Sarah McLachlan. I had never seen her live before, and was absolutely astounded by her voice and how personable her stage presence was. She hit the stage with nothing more than a grand piano and a guitar, and played six or seven songs. The crowd was pretty much in awe, and so was I. I sort of wished she would have kept playing all night, as it was really quite amazing.

During the course of the night I managed to shoot around 12 GB of photos. I shot mostly in RAW, which is something I’ve never done before. My camera has the ability to shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time, so I did a few trial runs with that. It was clear afterwards that the RAW images contained far more detail than the JPEGs. So before the concert picked up steam, I went down to the store and bought a new 8GB card for my camera. I have no intention of shooting JPEG again.

Leslie Feist took the stage at 9:30pm, which was about an hour later than originally planned. Arieanna, Ianiv and I were already seated on a wood planck in front of the stage (only a few chairs away from Gordon Campbell), so we had a great view of the concert. I’m actually not that familiar with every Feist has released, although I did my best to listen to a few tracks on iTunes before going.

Her concert was definitely interesting, as she combined music, light and visual performances in interesting ways. Unfortunately, from out vantage point the entire effect of the concert really required the use of the Jumbo Screens (to see what was going on behind Feist), something I hardly paid attention to.

Feist also plays tonight at Deer Lake park, and I think given the style of performance, and the outdoor setting, it will be a rather extraordinary event.

Without a doubt, BC Festival 150 was the most fun I’ve had shooting photos in a while. While attending the Canadian Juno Awards as a photographer was obviously a big privilege, I found the style of photography there, which consisted of people fighting each other to get shots, completely out of character for me. Hanging out in Victoria and shooting casual photos was far more to my liking.

Right before Feist went on we found out that 106,000 people were in attendance for the shows. Seeing the entire grass, Inner Harbour, and all the streets downtown crowded with people was truly an unbelievable sight.

So, a big thanks to Arieanna and Ianiv for inviting me along. I’m going to head home after work and hopefully sleep until tomorrow. I have about 1000 more photos to go through tonight, but until then feel free to browse my BC Festival 150 Flickr Set.