I had a blast photographing the Firefly Music Festival this past weekend. A lot of my main shooting was for a sponsor of the festival, but I also had a little free time to capture a little of the festival atmosphere as well. I always enjoy doing this sort of festival photography, as it gives a little sense of what it was like to be at a festival beyond the standard live shots. Here are some of my favorite Firefly Music Festival Photos.
Photographer's Notes:
Cameras Used:
Lenses Used:
Computer Gear:
Software:
- Adobe Lightroom
- Photo Mechanic
This was a great festival. A very nice, chill vibe. I also has the pleasure of meeting up with a number of photographers at the festival, which is always fun.
For Firefly, I kept my kit pretty basic. While I brought along the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, I never used it. Somewhat counter-intuitively, ultra-wide angle lenses can be a little too wide for large outdoor events like this. While the stages are massive, one is very often far enough away from subjects that 24mm on a full-frame camera works for most uses. In addition, the use of a third lens means having to use a belt system or other camera bag, which is another order of magnitude more complicated than just using two bodies with two lenses on a Black Rapid Double Strap.
With 80,000 attendees over the weekend, a huge amount of dust was kicked up into the air during the festival. Add in riding around backstage in a golf cart on dusty gravel paths, and keeping gear clean was a major issue. Not changing lenses kept my kit in good order, thanks to the weather sealing of the D800s and Nikon pro f/2.8 lenses.
As far as other gear, I was doing an edit right after my sets for this job, so that mean on-site ingest, edit and delivery. For this, I used an Apple MacBook Pro 15″ with Retina display. I used Photo Mechanic for the ingest and Adobe Lightroom for processing.
