laneway presents: wellington, and a question.
I don’t like reviews which are just the reviewer’s agenda indulged in for several paragraphs with a few barely-trying statements about the thing being reviewed towards the end. Which is why I’m not calling this a review…it’s just a question.
Tim and I acquired tickets to Laneway Presents: Wellington show last night, which was held in the Town Hall and acted as a kind of mini showcase of the proper event in Auckland the day before. We got to the door and were asked if our camera was a professional camera. The fact that it had interchangeable lenses deemed it unable to be brought in. There was no coat-check, so Tim had to run it home. It’s lucky we live within walking distance. No point getting angry at security, just delivering a message, and who had every right to look extremely unimpressed when I ventured a tentative, “we’re not professional, we just wanted to take a few photos for our music blog…?”
So, our question is, why? Why can’t a camera with a decent lens be allowed into this, or any similar event? We’ve never been turned away before - for example we took photos at Sharon Jones and Aloe Blacc’s gigs without any questions.
Firstly, I checked the Laneway website and Facebook page to make sure it wasn’t written in huge letters anywhere. The Laneway website doesn’t have a Wellington section, but in the general FAQs it says the following: No professional cameras (read: cameras with DETACHABLE lenses) are permitted without formal media accreditation. Likewise no audio or film recording equipment can be brought onto the Laneway site. Okay. The fact that people were videoing with their cameras and phones all over the place aside, If I’d read that, I certainly would’ve been warned. Except, because I didn’t have any questions about the event, I never checked the FAQs before going. Maybe the lesson here is: always read the FAQs.
The Facebook page didn’t seem to have any info about cameras. The one thing I did see prior to the show was a Twitter update from Laneway encouraging people to tag them in photos uploaded to Flickr; had I had any doubts about whether our camera was allowed, that would’ve eased the mind.
So then we tried to think of reasons for why our camera wasn’t allowed.
The only thing I could come up with was that the quality of the photos might detract from the exclusivity of the photos taken by the official photographer/s.
Well. I saw three people last night with massive cameras and lanyards, so rather than exclusivity, it seems as though the idea was to get a whole lot of quality photos…right? The security guard wasn’t to know that our photography skills aren’t even that great, and we haven’t got the equipment, the experience, or the access that the actual photographers have, not to mention that this site doesn’t get alarming traffic or anything. But still.
I just can’t make a logical argument for why it’s okay to have brilliant images from your official photographers, and then only allow potentially flash-bulbed, light-squiggled, blurred digicam photos? Or, if you’ve got ‘em, extremely respectable iPhone photos. What possible harm could come from some relatively okay photos taken by enthusiastic people and then uploaded to a website to show how fantastic a time we had at that event? Especially when a whole lot of photos from regular cameras will be - and are being encouraged to - uploaded in various online places too? I love finding photos from gigs I’ve been to. Once I’ve seen the official ones, I go looking for more. Maybe other people do too.
Does anyone in the know…know? Seriously, I’m just curious as because I’m not coming up with anything. And maybe the answer is really really obvious and I’ve just missed it somehow.
Other than that tense beginning, the music was great. Was going to talk about the music here too but this is tl;dr enough as it is so I’ll leave it here.
Thoughts?
