Thanks to the people running Lovebox 2010, I had a weekend pass to the festival, instructed to come back with “wide shots that show off the scale and beauty of the park” as well as whatever else caught my eye.

That’s actually a tricky brief: to get a sense of the scale of Lovebox’s Victoria Park setting, you really need aerial shots. Without access to balloon or microlight, I decided to take the brief as a ‘creative starter’ rather than attempt a too-literal interpretation which would have been doomed to failure or cliche: I was keen to avoid the ‘generic stock-shot’ look of so much festival photography — wide shots of happy crowds with hands in the air backlit by blazing sun, of sleeping punters roasting in front of the main stage, or of ‘interesting looking’ people gurning for the camera… yawn. I’m really tired of pictures/film of clubbers/party people having a good time, yet which offer no hint of how that feels.

On arrival Saturday, the sky over Victoria Park was boiling with fluffy cumulus, with the sun slanting down over the arena, the lazy afternoon crowd drinking and dreaming in the heat. Given the magnificence of the sky, I decided to shoot the festival from the viewpoint of one of those blissed-out festival children, glazed and dazed in the late afternoon shade — a vision of mostly sky, colours washed into bluegreen on first opening eyes to the sun after a half-nap between acts… not pictures of the people, rather some shots which evoke the long afternoon festival experience — everything a little trippy, everything a little bigger, brighter in that beautiful park setting which is unique to Lovebox.

On Sunday I spent a short while in the photographer’s pit proper at the main stage. Hassles with security and indifference to the possibilities down there (and the presence of plenty of other good photographers taking what would have ended up as exactly the same shots) discouraged me from wasting much time in the pit. In the end, I spent most of the afternoon backstage at Block9′s NYC Downlow stage with the Horse Meat Disco/Disco Bloodbath/East End performance crew. Super annoyed though that due to my USELESS IPHONE I got the timings wrong to catch Feral on the main stage (sorry Caron, next time).

All in all, It was a lovely weekend, and to my eye at least I have a few photos which capture some of the magic at Victoria Park.

Flickr photoset is here, or click the image above for a slideshow of highlights.

Big thanks to Adrian at Lovebox for AAA, Gideon at Block9 for backstage, all the usual people for all the usual reasons.

As with the previous releases in the series, Future Disco 3 is a mix best experienced start-to-finish — Sean has the production of ‘this is a journey’ setlists programmed somewhere deep in his DJ DNA. Enjoy on a sunny day with your feet up. Or on the dancefloor.

I’m proud that some more of my clubland photos again feature in the accompanying booklet.

I’ve bought an Olympus E-P2, as I really need something a little less conspicuous than my D300 for the occasions when big camera kit is simply not going to get thru the door at clubs or events. Image quality and handling is great, but the flash is — of course — next to useless, and — more importantly for me — has no AF-assist: my ‘from the hip’ technique is pretty dependent on auto-AF which ‘just works’ (thank you Nikon for the CLS and SB800!), so I’m looking at options for LED lighting to replace/augment the flash. More on that soon.

I’ve also taken the opportunity of meeting up with one of my very favourite Flickr people, Jiré Gözen, who very generously took us out clubbing the other night down Shibuya way. After a couple of gin and tonics at Red, we ended up at Trump Room for a bit, before getting turned away at Unit as we lacked photo ID (!).

The E-P2 came with me to the Trump Room. If I’d taken my D300, there would have been more and better shots, but you only learn your way around a new tool through the use of it, so the evening was productive for learning, if not for adding many photos to the archives… we’ll see what I come up with when I’ve got the lighting sorted…