Roskilde Festival Summer Days was a string of 8 small individual events spread over 2 long weekends, invented after all the usual Summer festivals were canceled back in April. In the words of Roskilde Festival: “We have to meet this Summer” and thank the maker that they came up with this concept! Once people had shown their Corona Passport (meaning you are either vaccinated or have a recent negative test) at the gate, a crowd of 1000 people were allowed into 2 separate sections of 500. Now, the real magic part began – once you were in, the concert was completely normal! You could stand up, jump, dance, cheer, shout, sing, mosh! I cannot describe what a goose bumpingly feeling this was, to be in a crowd again. I realised on day 1 that I had actually given up hope that this would ever come back. See the header picture above with all the hands in the air? That was shot on my first day there, and I just could not get enough of photographing hands and the crowd and getting the crowd in every frame I made. Something I had not been able to for 18 months.
I was one half of the official phototeam for Summer Days alongside my good friend and fellow Fujifilm photographer Kim Matthäi Leland. We split the 8 days between us but did have one day where we shot it together as a team, which was super nice and it enabled us to finally make a team photo, something we have always forgot to do at the normal Roskilde Festivals. You can see the team photo and read more about my choice of gear at the end of the post.
I cannot yet again overstate just how magical it was to enjoy live music in an almost unrestricted way again. Actually it was unrestricted, it was just very small. Less than 1% size of the normal Roskilde Festival. But the 500 people in front of the stage made it huge, jumping, dancing, smiling, singing, moshing, clapping. Goosebumps. I hope you enjoy this trip through Summer Days, I hope you enjoy the crowd and the artists and the love of live music events that are burned into every frame. Go out and enjoy some live music and support the scene.
Click on an image to open fullscreen.
§
I promised you a team photo, so here it is! Kim on the left, me on the right. I am using my 2 x silver Fujifilm X-T3s, by far the best still photo camera Fujifilm makes, with XF16-55mm zoom and XF90mm F2 prime for the close-ups. I wanted to bring the 16-55 because it was important we also made a lot of crowd and lifestyle pictures for Roskilde and it is so much easier to do that with a zoom like that. As we could get fairly close to the stage, the 90mm was great for close-ups. And it is much lighter than the XF-50-140 (that you can see Kim using).