ARD 604. Focus Music Festival Wales.

Focus Music Festival

      The Focus Music Festival Wales is a music event that is held in Wrexham and is now in its third year. Every year the festival grows in popularity and size and this year was the largest so far. As part of The Wrexham film and photography Collective we were excited about being the main company that is to cover the four day music event. The festival is held over eight locations around the Wrexham area and consists of 100 bands playing over the four days.

      The job of organising all the members of the collective proved to be a major undertaking with 25 photographers and film makers taking part to cover the events. The festival was to play host to local artists and also international bands from such places as Denmark and Korea.

      The Thursday was the first day of the festival and it was my job to photographically cover the bands in St Giles Church in Wrexham. With such a beautiful venue playing host to the evenings bands I was excited about the evening ahead and the images that I would be able to capture. I was aware of the low lighting conditions so opted to set a fairly high iso level on my Nikon DSLR and also chose a small aperture of f4.5 as to cancel out and movement blur.

Thursday Night

Casi Wyn

      The first performer of the evening was Casi Wyn, a female pianist and singer from Bangor, North Wales

      I enjoyed the sett by Casi Wyn and took the opportunity of the first act to refine the settings on my DSLR and to find the best places to stand for the shots that I required.

Dan San

The second band were Dan San from Belgium

Upon editing the images for Focus Wales I decided to use this dark style below for some of the bands.

Little Arrow

I'm not really a fan of using selective colour editing on my photographs but for this shot of Little Arrow below I decided to use it as to emphasise the beautiful blue of the stained glass windows in the background.

On the image below I carefully composed the shot as to capture the chandelier in the background

Heal the last stand

Heal the last stand were to be the headlining act for the night at St Giles church. The Collective have been involved with this band for a while now so I wanted to capture a lot of nice shots of them.

Below is one of my favourite images from the whole event

Charlotte Church

Charlotte Church was headlining the evening at Central Station. I wasn't down to be a photographer at Central Station that night but I felt it was an opportunity that I couldn't let slip, so after Heal the last stand had finished their sett I made my way over to the venue to capture some images.

Friday night

On the Friday night I was to stay in Central Station all night to capture the bands performing. There are two stages in Central Station so I had to manage my time carefully between the two. I was aware that the light in the venue was pretty poor so i decided to use my prime lens of f1.8 with a high iso level. Below are a selection if my favourite shots from the night.

 The Roseville Band

The image below is my favourite from The Roseville Band

Mushy Callahan

 This is the best shot from this band

Below are a selection of other images from the night.

The Beutons

Saturday Night

The highlight for me on the Saturday night was Michael Rothers.

Meiler

I have photographed Meiler on a number of occasions so again wanted to get some good images of him.

Other images from Friday night

      I feel that covering the Focus Wales music festival was a massive triumph for The Wrexham film and photography collective and I know that I gained some valuable experience with relation to covering live events. If all goes well with the film editing hopefully we will be able to cover the event next year too.