Well guys, I guess everyone fails somehow from time to time. So it happened to me when I was shooting at this year's Stains In The Sun Festival on September 13th (I know it's been a while) in Schwarzenberg, Germany. But before I talk about that, good things first.
It was an unbelievable pleasure to see something like the SITS happen in my hometown once again. It's not only that I met so many friends there that I haven't seen for much too long or the many cool bands that played on the two stages at the beautiful location called 'Naturbühne'. The main thing that made this event so great, was all the other stuff that was going on that day. Since the festival was organized by an association called 'Agenda Alternativ' (www.agenda-alternativ.de), which is all about political education, there were several workshops that day. For example, there was one that picked out the situation of refugees in Germany, and particularly in Saxony, as a central theme. There was also a little exhibition with some words and photos about this matter in the festival area. This is quite a big issue, since many political parties and media in Germany regularly paint the picture of criminal, dangerous and bloodsucking foreigners while stirring up anxiety and hate amongst the locals. That's a thing that makes me really really sad and I am very glad, that there are people out there, who are constantly working for better communication about this matter. In addition, there were several other workshops. For example, the visitors had the chance to print their own T-shirts using the screen print method or take some cans and create some graffiti on the prepared walls. Just to sum it up: Stains In The Sun II was bloody awesome.
But now back to me messing up hard that day. I used my Nikon D7100 for shooting at the festival. At this camera, the button for the ISO-setting is right next to the one where you can zoom in on your photos and change the quality of the pictures you're taking. That means, with this button you can switch between shooting in RAW-format or JPGs in different sizes. I still don't have any clue why the guys at Nikon have put this button there, because you normally don't want to change the quality settings. In fact, I haven't shot JPGs since I started shooting RAW a couple of weeks after the purchase of my first DSLR. That was several years ago. But, to cut to the chase, I did shoot JPGs for more than half of the Festival. Somehow I had switched to the JPG-setting at some point, when I wanted to change the ISO-setting. That has never happened to me before. But the most annoying part is, that I didn't check my settings at any point. Usually I do this regularly during a shoot. I could say that I was a little bit distracted, because I mainly was at the festival to party with my friends and enjoy the evening (and guess what – that's what I did). But that would be kind of choosing the easy way. I just have to admit, that I failed that evening, because checking the settings from time to time on the second display of the camera is really not that big a deal. But that is a mistake, I probably won't make a second time and I just can give each of you photographing people out there the following advice: check your settings regularly, when you are on a shoot. A blessing in disguise for me was, that at least I changed the settings to the highest quality JPGs. So most of the shots turned out quite OK. But nevertheless, shooting RAW would have given me much more room in post editing and many more pictures would have been usable. So here's another advice from my side: if you are shooting JPGs at the moment and really want to take your photography to the next level, consider switching to RAW-format. That means, you will have to do some tweaks to every picture you want to use with an editing program of your choice, since there won't be applied any sharpening, contrast increase or any other fancy stuff to your photos directly in the camera. By shooting RAW, making this decision is completely up to you. That might seem a little bit complicated at this point, but trust me, it's definitely worth it.
So enough with all the gibberish. Of course, I will show you some of the shots I took at the wonderful SITS Festival. This gallery includes pictures of the following acts in order of appearance: Auf Dor Gartenbank, Unknown Artist, Dann&Wann, Haddocks, Chemnitz Connection, The Creech, Ashpipe, Kobito, All For Nothing, Die Leims, Knochenfarbik.
Here you go!
