The Weekend I Stopped Hiding Behind the Camera

Faversham Hop Festival, view from my window

Every year, for one weekend in September, Faversham gets a little bit… chaotic.

The Faversham Hop Festival takes over the town, filling the streets with live music, dancing, singing, drinking and quite a lot of people having a very good time.

And when I say it takes over the town, I mean it.

I live right in the centre of Faversham, in a small, slightly quirky property that dates back to the 1690s. During Hop Festival weekend, the festival is quite literally outside my window.

I can look out and see thousands of people wandering through the streets, dancing, singing, drinking and generally enjoying themselves.

So I had two choices. I could disappear for the weekend and find somewhere quiet, or I could embrace it and obviously, I chose the latter.

Although there was one slight problem, I don't drink anymore which makes spending an entire weekend surrounded by thousands of people drinking seem like either an incredibly good photographic opportunity or a terrible life decision, possibly both.

Saturday was intense, really intense. The town was absolutely packed, and at times it was almost impossible to photograph anything.

Normally, when I'm shooting street photography, I tend to work quite discreetly. I like to photograph from the hip, move through a scene and let things happen naturally rather than announcing that I'm taking someone's photograph.

That simply wasn't going to work here, there were so many people that even getting my camera up to my eye was sometimes a challenge, let alone finding something interesting happening in front of me.

And then there was the light, the sun was incredibly bright, producing those wonderfully brutal combinations of deep shadow and blown-out highlights.

I wasn't about to walk around Faversham all day carrying a flash just to fight the sunlight, so I decided to work with it, or at least try to.

The result? Saturday wasn't particularly successful. There were plenty of photographs. There were plenty of interesting moments, but very few images that actually made me stop and think, yes, that's the one and that's fine.

Not every time you take a camera somewhere results in a great set of photographs, sometimes you spend a day learning what doesn't work.

So on Sunday I changed the rules.

Rather than trying to sneak photographs from the edges of the crowd, I decided I was going to approach people.

Actually approach them and ask if I could take their photograph.

The Raven Drummers

This is something that, despite having photographed people for years, I don't always find particularly easy.

There's a strange vulnerability involved in walking up to a complete stranger and essentially saying: "Hi. Can I take your photograph?" But something happened, it worked, people were incredibly receptive.

Perhaps it was the atmosphere. Perhaps it was the fact that everyone was already in a good mood. Or perhaps people simply liked the idea of being part of the festival rather than just being photographed as they passed through it.

Whatever the reason, suddenly the photography became much easier.

And, more importantly, much more personal.

Instead of trying to capture the crowd, I was photographing the people within it, the characters, the expressions, the outfits, the people who had clearly been enjoying themselves for considerably longer than I had and once I started talking to people, I found myself seeing the festival differently.

I think this is probably the biggest thing I took away from the weekend.

I'd gone out intending to document the Hop Festival but perhaps I was looking at it in the wrong way.

A festival isn't really the music stages, the beer tents or the crowds, it's the people, it's the woman dancing like nobody is watching, the bloke who's somehow still standing at the end of the day, the group of friends who have clearly been coming here together for years, the stranger who sees a camera and immediately gives you a ridiculous pose.

Those are the photographs that start to tell the story and ironically, by abandoning my usual approach to street photography, I ended up getting much closer to what I actually wanted to photograph.

I stopped hiding behind the camera and I started talking to people and my photographs got better.

There's also something quite special about photographing an event like this when it's happening literally on your doorstep.

I'm not visiting Faversham for the weekend, this is home.

I've watched the town change, lived amongst its strange little corners and walked these streets countless times but during Hop Festival weekend, it's almost as though someone has taken the Faversham I know and turned the volume up to eleven.

For one weekend, the streets belong to everybody and despite the noise, the crowds, the occasional chaos and the fact that I spent two days surrounded by people drinking while completely sober…

I'm glad I stayed, I think running away would have been the easy option.

Picking up the camera was the better one and Sunday reminded me of something I've probably forgotten a little along the way: Sometimes the best way to photograph people is simply to talk to them first.