My Saturday Night at Lotus Fest, Part 2

Part 1

...Let me tell you how I almost lost that photo.

Someone who looked like a tech guy for the band ran to the edge of the stage and jumped off. I moved out of the way, but my camera bag, slung over my shoulder, didn't move as much as I expected. He jumped through the bag, breaking a strap buckle and spilling some photo materials on the ground. My eyes went wide as I bent down to clean it up without people stepping on a UV filter or a macro lens attachment. As I gathered everything and put it on an empty part of the stage in front of me, I saw the tech guy gathering a group of people behind him. I wondered what they were going to do.

Sure enough, they all walked onto the stage for the last song of the set. Pandemonium ensued, and as the crowd started to jump in unison, I shot like crazy. The lights would flash on and off, of course, but the flashes of red played to my advantage.

In fact, I got two photos with a red background and crowd members jumping in a sea of blue light. The contrast immediately looked astounding on my camera's back screen, but I've grown to distrust that screen, so I didn't give it any more thought.

I kept shooting until I realized I was almost out of room on my memory card. Frantically, I went to the beginning of my card to delete photos from the night before. I could afford to delete them because a) the band was off-stage while everyone was shouting for an encore and b) I had dropped the previous day's Lotus photos on my laptop. Those were safe to delete.

But I also had photos I couldn't delete. I left photos that I hadn't dropped onto my laptop, so every time I went to delete the previous day's Lotus photos, I had to skip over photos from Monday and Tuesday. That made the time it took to delete photos longer, which meant I missed some of the action on stage.

I was afraid I would miss too much of the encore if I kept going to the beginning and skipping through earlier photos. so, I began to delete photos I had just taken. I went maybe ten photos back and pressed the "trash" button on each of a series of photos that were either too blurry or poorly lit.

The deleting became so automatic that I cleared one of the crowd-jumping photos.

I whispered, "Crap!" to myself and stopped deleting immediately. I had made enough room to finish the night (25 & 33), and while I didn't make it back to the vendor's tent in time to buy their album (they ran out almost immediately), I went home with kick-ass photos.

IDS management agreed. Even though I didn't get the front-page photo (that distinction went to Ryan Dorgan's photo from Los de Abajo on Friday night), my photo of the crowd on the stage (the one I DIDN'T delete!) was the dominant element on the photo page.

So, it was a good day.