The famous Orange Stage at Roskilde Festival
I recently had the great privilege and exciting challenge of shooting the mighty Roskilde Festival for Red Bull Denmark. Roskilde Festival is the 2nd largest festival in Europe, with more than 130,000 visitors. This actually makes the festival the 4th largest city in Denmark during the week it takes place!
4 days of countless concerts and very long work days, most of the time spent sprinting between the stages and the press center in the backstage village. It is the biggest gig I have ever done in terms of number of concerts and people. It was spectacular, exciting, hard, tiring, amazing, cold, wet, muddy, frustrating, exhilarating, inspiring, wonderful – and everything in between. Honestly, I still don’t have the words yet to describe the entire festival shooting experience. From getting to capture some truly wonderful (and some not so wonderful) artists working for amazing people, meeting great and inspirational colleagues – to being a very grumpy old man about the cold, the rain and f#cked up photo restrictions fragmenting every gig to a lousy soulless 3 song hit and run job…Roskilde 2016 had it all!
Until I find the words, I will just leave you to enjoy a small gallery of pictures showcasing a tiny bit of the thousands of shots I made. Some koncerts I covered such as MØ and Minds of 99 deserve their own blog posts and they will come. I will also make a detailed blogpost about the experience of photographing Roskilde and what Fujifilm gear I used (I tell ya, weather sealing totally works). All to come. For now, a small gallery to kick start my Roskilde Festival 2016 stories on the blog.
PS. I must thank a bunch of people, especially Red Bull’s Pia Baunsgaard and Kristian Karl, and the amazing help and support from fellow wonderful Fujifilm people: Ib Thordal, Klaus Bo and Kim Matthäi Leland. Big shoutout to my partner in crime, photographer Kevin Sherchan Frandsen and all the great people and photographers I met. Thanks also to the food stall next to the press center for countless bowls of chili con carne!
Roskilde Festival 2016 – gallery 1
This was not one of the wettest Roskilde festivals but it did rain plenty! Orange Stage one wet morning.
MØ performs at Orange Stage and I get one of my favourite pictures from the entire festival! Much more to come from this concert.
LCD Soundsystem were not easy to shoot from the horrible photo pit at Orange stage but the music was awesome of course, so was the disco ball.
Danko Jones played old-skool kick ass rock music. A genre I really do not care for, but must admit they were really cool!
I really like hip hop but Young Thug was absolutely horrible. Clearly, the Young Crowd listening to the Thug disagrees and thinks I am just an old grumpy man!
Red Hot Chili Peppers did not want any photographers in the pit, f#cked up, so we were led about a kilometer away to shoot 3 songs from the sound booth! It was a good spot for wide angle audience shots so not all was lost!
Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers – a close up made possible by the Fujinon 50-140mm lens. Thank you so much Kim Matthäi Leland for lending me your lens for this concert!
Mac Demarco, I had no idea who he was, but man do they have a big following. As always, I want the lights in the frame!
The crowd certainly loved Tenacious D, so much they did not even notice the turbo lasers in the background! It’s War of The Worlds at Roskilde!
Jack Black and company in Tenacious D, are they a comedy act or a rock band? Either way, quite entertaining to watch.
More MØ, owning the Orange stage, connecting to the 50,000 fans. I have seen her play for 50 people back in 2012, it is incredible to see her on top of the world now.
Niels Brandt of Minds of 99 enters the Arena stage at 2am Saturday – by far my favourite concert at Roskilde
A band called Destroyer. I was expecting you know, heavy metal! Instead, a soulful singer songer-writer emerged. Shot on the really nice Avalon stage.
Calypso Rose – the funkiest, sweetest, most charming performer I saw, dancing and singing her way – in socks – at age 76 into everyone’s hearts.
Neil Young…he came, he saw, he sat down…at a piano facing us photographers with about 234 mike stands in the way! For the first song, this was all I could see of him.
Fortunately, he did stand up and I could get the one close up I needed, waiting for that moment where I can shoot him in between mike stands and monitors. You end up making a lot of these shots, just “recording”, getting press coverage from the one locked down position you are in, not much art or music photography involved.
Bomba Estereo, love them, and it was great to get to shoot them on Orange Stage.
It’s the War of the Worlds – quick, run, call HG Wells!
Minds of 99 blew me away and turned me into a huge fan. Much more to come from this concert.
…. More mud, more tales, more pictures to come …
