Event Photography: Shaftesbury Fringe Festival

Faruk Kara
Dec 26, 2025
3 min read

I was at the Shaftesbury Fringe Festival photographing the event down in Dorset this summer. Photographing events presents it's own challenges. You want great individual photos, but ultimately you want all the photos to sit together coherently and tell the story of the event. Whether it is a celebration, rememberance, or performance, I am always looking for photos that tell the viewer about the attendees, the atmosphere. A pet hate is the social media presentation of applying a consistent filter to all the photos. It plays to an imposed conformity, is unimagative, fails to convey, is lazy and bland, bland, bland.

I first attended the Shaftesbury Fringe Festival - run over 3 days in late July - in 2024. An old college friend invited me down for the weekend and it coincided with the festival. What a bonus. There are festivals up and down the country and I'm sure they all have their unique draw. What I like about the Shaftesbury Festival is that it is a small, local event where the performers are dotted around the town in pubs, churches, yards, cafes and anywhere the artist can perform and an audience can gather to watch.

Most of the gigs are donate-what-you-think-it-is-worth when the hat is passed around. And, something I learned after last year, was to make sure to have plenty of coins/small notes. The performers work, they entertain, and they deserve to be rewarded. Not all the shows are free, with those in the established venues being ticketed.

This year (2025) they had a large marquee with an area in front, just like a music festival. For me, it didn't have the atomosphere of what was happening around the rest of the town. I am sure, looking at the crowd, it was catering for another audience, which is, of course, important. I just hope that the event doesn't get too big, and squeeze out the local talent, of which there was plenty.

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't take the camera with me for evening and night gigs. I just felt the weight was too much, but really pleased that I did for the closing Jamarca concert. Next year I will experiment with taking my 50mm lens. It is a lot lighter than my more versatile 24-70mm, and f1.4 so fanastic for the lower light conditions. However, as they say with a prime lens, when you want to zoom in, step closer; when you want to zoom out, step away. Neither of these options are always possible when shooting concerts with an audience.

The challenge, regardless of whichever lens, is making sure you get the shot without a member of the audiences' head in the middle of the frame, or including all the clutter of equipment and wires. Having a camera with a lot of pixels means you can crop, and crop, and crop again while still having a decent sized result at the end of it. I've learned to compose my shots with cropping in mind.