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Lovedrop Festival
Official Photographer
How marrying two of my main loves in life didn't go as well as I thought it might!
So the Friday of the festival came round and after a stressful morning packing and a four-hour drive, we arrived late and as soon as we drew into the campsite, we started bumping into friends. Our daughter ran happily off into the kids field with a couple of her little pals and we were left trying to decide whether to pitch our tent or get down to the festival - as the Sock Fighting Championships (!?!) were starting! We decided to pitch the tent later on and get straight down to the action, with my camera. When we got there, I set up my camera immediately and started crawling around on the floor, snapping all the action of this utterly silly, crazy competition! There was so much going on that although I’d only just arrived, I instantly felt guilty for being late and worried I wasn't getting enough photographs! Meanwhile, my partner Nick was catching up and chatting and mingling with lots of friends we hadn't seen in ages.
By dusk, we'd done the rounds and realised we better get our beast of a new tent set up, before darkness set in. We had only used the tent once before, but it was a blow up and was pretty easy to set up, apart from the fact it's absolutely huuuge (we call it The Mustard Mansion!) Tent set up, we realised we were hungry and it was getting dark, so defo time to make some food! By the time we'd eaten and put Fern, our daughter, to bed, I realized that I was pretty tired too. It seemed that Friday night was a pretty chilled one, so we went to bed earlyish, around midnight.
I love festivals; always have, always will. From my very first venture to V97 in Temple Newsom, Leeds, with a gang of school friends and my mum and stepdad in tow… to Exit festival on the banks of the river Danube in Serbia, to a 4-day NYE festival on top of a mountain on Koh Tao in Thailand… I've done the lot! I'm old enough to have climbed the fence to get into Glastonbury, just before they built the big metal fence. I've worked Glasto and many festivals, for other people and for myself! I've been on clothes stalls and food stands, I've done festival decor and even DJ’ed. However, the one thing I'd never done until last summer was professionally photograph a festival!
So when Alex and Rosey, the lovely couple who run Love Drop Festival, put out a call on Facebook for a paid position as their official photographer last year, I jumped at the chance! Not only did I get paid, my family and I also received an exclusive freebie invitation to the private, invite-only boutique festival in the rolling Shropshire hills, too! Although I live in Leeds we do have a big gang of Shropshire friends, which is how I met Alex and Rosey in the first place.
There was a wonderful fancy dress parade and I got right down the front of the crowd to photograph; then Alex and I organised a big group photograph, which I was particularly proud of - as you can see everyone looks so fabulous and sparkly and colourful! During the edit I just had to Photoshop the Love Drop’ logo coming through the cloud!
Back to Saturday afternoon - and by this point I'd been enjoying wandering around photographing everyone with my very heavy camera for a good six hours, so I decided to pop my camera back at the tent, while we had some food and an early evening dance! Once the Disco Tent got going, I thought it would be time to get my camera back out again, but as I made my way down the front of the dance floor, I realized just how packed it was and steamy and sweaty! There was no way I could take photographs with my huge SLR on such a packed dance floor, so I decided to bob back to the tent and swap it out with the gimbal for my phone and make a load of video content. The Sunday was a far more chilled affair, with lots of great crafting workshops and kids activities to photograph - we had a wonderful day, although we had to leave by late afternoon to get back to Yorkshire.
I slept like a log - straight through until 9am - and when I looked at my phone there were about four or five missed calls from Alex, the festival owner and a text message at 12.20am asking where I was, because the headline band had been playing and they wanted me to photograph all the action!!! Well, I had no idea that ‘Dog Show’ was the headline act! I gotta say, I had wondered on Friday afternoon why they were having a dog show in the middle of the night, but I didn't think much of it! Turned out they were actually a crazy act that everyone was excited to see - except for us - as we were fast asleep!
So I started out on Saturday feeling incredibly guilty and extremely embarrassed about Friday night’s early night and the fact I missed so much of the fun. I quickly got up, grabbed my camera and went straight down to ‘town’ and made sure I started photographing the Yoga session that was happening in the main tent. The rest of Saturday was pretty lush - the sun came out and it was fancy dress day. The festival-goers did not disappoint with their incredibly lavish and over-the-top crazy outfits, all around the theme ‘Curious Creatures!’
Now, I'm not saying I didn't enjoy myself that weekend, because I did have an enormous amount of fun - however, what I did find was that although I love festivals and dancing and dressing up AND I love photography, it's really hard to bring them all together. I didn’t realise I would find being behind the camera, with the pressure of trying to capture everything, quite so stressful. I think I learnt that I really like to just enjoy festivals as an immersive and freeing experience and in future, it’s best to not try and turn them into work!
