This was a lot of fun to shoot, 4 stages, 10,000 or so dance music fans, tons of lights and costumes and dancers and booze and everything else! In the full set, you will find photos of: Skream & Benga, Moby, Diplo, Tittsworth, Scott Henry, Armand Van Helden, Zedd, and lots and lots of fans.
Raver culture was there in full effect at Virgin Fest this year… perhaps fitting, since we are apparently in the midst of a full-fledged rave/dubstep takeover… Deadmau5 brought out a huge throng of kids, who stayed til the very end of FreeFest, the west stage area by the ferris wheel reaching the biggest capacity it had all festival.
There were also a lot of dudes doing Deadmau5 cosplay:
Last week, after seeing Will Oldham play, I decided to go to the complete OPPOSITE side of the spectrum and dropped in at HARD Tour at Sonar to check out Crystal Castles, Rusko, and Sinden. I got there just in time to see (well, mostly hear) Rye Rye closing out the set with Sinden, which sounded great… After some hanging out with old bros, I shot Rusko, who is always fun and then did my best to shoot Crystal Castles… they had the photographer’s pit blocked off for their set because the crowd was CRAZY. Who knew that Crystal Castles’ fans were so wild? I remember them being a band that only appealed to a few in the know people but I guess they have blown up to major proportions since the last time I checked. Anyway, I got a few shots of them from the sidestage/a distance and in general marvelled at the crowdsurfing ways of the youth. Fun night.
My photo of dubsteb artist Martyn in Rugged & K magazines.