My highlight of 2014 was when I travelled to Europe to join my two sons at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival, a week of music and young fun. I was the odd one out, probably the oldest camper among about 80,000 Danes and other Europeans in their twenties. It was a peak experience.
This photo is not a peak achievement. It was taken on a little travel camera that I could risk at the festival. The stage lighting completely blows out the centre of the image, and the rest is very noisy because of the high ISO setting. But the photo is flawless in terms of the memories it evokes.
The band on the famous Orange Stage at the time was the Arctic Monkeys, barely visible in the brilliant white lighting. We also saw the Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder, Jack White and Outkast, among many, many more. Having photographic mementos of such a wonderful event is a treasure. The photo was taken in a moment but it has enduring value.
Having achieved one aim by moving up to a full-frame SLR, I had to deal with the downside – the weight and expense of the gear and its desirability in the eyes of would-be thieves. The little travel camera was another Nikon, but a point and shoot which was the smallest and cheapest camera I could find that would shoot RAW files. Shooting RAW wasn’t enough to save the photo above, but I managed some reasonable images even though the small sensor limited the colour depth of the photos.
In contrast to the spontaneous photo at the festival, sometimes you can wait for years to get the chance to photograph a subject in just the right conditions. This photo was taken at Shelley Beach, not far from where we live. I had been there many times and had seen the hang-gliders and parasailers launching from the hilltop into the fresh ocean breeze. Their activity peaks around Christmas and New Year.
But for many years, I was unable to jag the right day to get there with a camera. Some days I would have the time available to go there and take pics, and the wind would die down, or the sky would cloud over. On other days, the breeze was in and the sky was clear and blue, and I would be headed into town to go to work, or to meet family commitments. Years passed.
But patience wins the day. Eventually the elements and my availability coincided and I spent a few hours one day in 2014 taking pics of people launching themselves off the top of the Shelley Beach hill, to soar into the sky and circle serenely over the beach before descending to the white sand.