Brisbane has a rich and varied events calendar — outdoor festivals, street parades, concerts, cultural celebrations, protest marches, sporting events — and I have spent years photographing across most of it. Each event type is a different photographic challenge, and each one has taught me something that has carried across to the others.
The most common mistake at events is treating coverage as the goal. When you try to document everything, you end up with photographs that show what happened but don’t communicate how it felt. The images that hold up over time are the ones where you made a choice — this person, this moment, this frame — rather than photographing everything and hoping something worked.
On festivals: Outdoor festivals in daylight are technically forgiving and compositionally challenging. There is too much going on, the backgrounds are busy, and you are constantly competing with other photographers for position. I have found it most productive to pick one area, stay with it, and let the event move through me rather than chasing it across a field.
On concerts: Concert photography rewards preparation. Know the setlist if you can, know where the light will be in the first three songs, get your exposure set before the first note. The pit is chaotic and brief — most venues give you three songs — and the photographers who get the best work are the ones who have planned for it.
On street events: Parades and street events spread across a large area and the best images often come from the edges rather than the centre. The main parade route is crowded with photographers. Fifty metres back, or twenty metres to the side, you find angles and interactions that nobody else is making.
On crowds: Crowd photography is its own discipline. A crowd at night, lit from a stage, is one of the most technically demanding subjects — you need shutter speed to freeze motion, aperture to maintain depth of field, and ISO that the sensor can handle cleanly. When it works, it is one of the most powerful images event photography produces.
Brisbane events are worth photographing. The city has a generosity of spirit at public events that shows up clearly in the images.