Lost & Found #34: Wellington International Jazz Festival 2002
Trumpeter Dave Douglas performs at the Wellington International Jazz Festival, 2002
With the Wellington Jazz Festival set to return in just a few weeks, I thought I'd have a look back at a few of the earlier editions for the next few Lost & Found posts. I was their photographer for a few of the events - 2002-04, and on its return in 2009 when the NZ International Arts Festival produced it for the first time.
In 2002, we were based at James Cabaret over a period of two weeks in October & November, with a range of Kiwi and international artists performing; and I had my first digital SLR. It was a Canon D60, which had cost a frightening sum not so much sooner, had three focus points (compared with modern cameras' 51 or more!) and could pretty much only shoot .jpgs, not RAW files. Still - it was DIGITAL! Only a year earlier, I'd been using a manual focus T90 camera from 1986; suddenly everything had changed.
I'd love to tell a bunch of great behind the scenes stories from the festival, but to be honest it's a while ago now! I do remember how the blurred images of Dave Douglas' band happened - I decided to cross over to the side of the stage for one song, and see what the angle looked like from there rather than front of house. The only problem with this was that the song was about 20 mins long, and I didn't want to walk in front of the audience during the show; so I was there for a while, and decided to experiment a bit since I had the time to do so. I've always liked the results!
There are a couple of images in here I shouldn't really call 'lost', though - the blurred sax player in the gallery above has been on my website ever since, and the one below has been welcoming people to Wellington by the airport ever since! Though I think the ad agency took the fern ball from the first image above and added it to the sky of this one, if I remember correctly.
They did tell me mine were the cleanest, sharpest digital files they'd seen, though - which was nice to hear! (That's a combination of a good camera and good technique, obviously...)
Chris Peirce performs in Civic Square at the launch of the Wellington International Jazz Festival, 2002.