I whine a lot about Ottawa being the armpit of Canada, bypassed by bigger bands travelling the 401 between Montréal and Toronto… usually stopping in Kingston – but rarely coming up here. And in recent years, we’ve had quite the drought of concerts; my favourite venue, Barrymore’s, has pretty much converted to a dance-hall, Capital Music Hall still sucks – and rarely has good/big gigs, Zaphods and LiveLounge are fun and intimate, but either sell out too quick or you’re really sardined in there. Not to knock the local/small/Cancon acts that do come to town, but Ottawa’s had it pretty bad for a couple of years.

… Thus it’s big & exciting when the Bluesfest roster rolls around, especially now that it’s only vaguely constrained to the actual blues, you end up getting to see just about any type of act: rap, country, electronic, dance, metal, prog.rock… it runs the gamut, for 2 weeks!

This year, when the major acts were announced, I was just about ready to plunk down 250 of my hard-earned dollars… but I wanted to check one thing first: The photography policy.

Okay, this looks sane: personal photography is permitted, no rules banning SLRs, no tripods allowed (okay, why would you anyway?), no rules banning monopods. Restrictions are announced by the MCs before the shows.

Pretty reasonable. Let’s do it!

Fast-forward to last week…

I got some great shots of Dream Theater, Metric, Lights, and even Rush!

But that’s where the trouble started.

See, despite having legit tickets for every night, a friend of mine whom I’ve been giving photography tutorials to has a few All Access passes. So not only am I getting great shots from all sorts of bizarre locations on the grounds, I’m also pretty impervious to security and their whims – not that it’d been a problem anyway.

Until Rush.

See, I figured I’d take advantage of my special access and setup a time-lapse capture, using a wide-angle lens from about a 12′ perch. Have a look:

Rush TimeLapse from Myke on Vimeo.

You’ll notice the video ends somewhat abruptly. It turns out some maniac “band security” person started to haul down my camera by it’s corded remote cable! Then he proceeded to get into an argument with my friend about what constitutes “professional photography” and what not. Word on the street has it that “band security” went through the crowd and attempted to seize other people’s cameras & memory cards.

Okay – that sucks; aside from bad manners and some serious disrespect for people’s gear – it’s understandable, but that’s if someone had announced that no photography was allowed. Thing is, there was no MC announcement before the Rush show.

Next event at Bluesfest – new photography policy! No cameras with detachable lenses!

Wait. What?

Bluesfest updated the website (and managed to actually break the page), and Tweeted saying “see website for more details” about the new policy… which has no real details, just that vague new rule. Add to this policy is the bit where the Bluefest site rotates through user-submitted content via their Flickr group, where they encourage people to post their Bluesfest photos…

Here’s the thing, people are still allowed cameras – if they have media passes. I’d decided not to get those since I’m not a) media, b) shooting pro, c) trying to get in for free, d) interested in front-of-house photos, e) interested in getting kicked out after 3 songs. Also, last year they let any yahoo get a media pass; there were people up there with junk P&S cameras snapping away… It was a bit of a joke. This year it was clear they were only allowing select people, very few of them, and requests were due quite a ways in advance of the event (IIRC about 30+ days).

“Okay Myke, so don’t go shooting. Just enjoy the music.”

Well after a decade of shooting concerts, I’ve gotten pretty good at enjoying doing both thanks. And that’s not really the point. I basically feel like we’ve been baited & switched. If it wasn’t for the All-Access passes I’ve been getting, I’d be reconsidering attending.

As it is, I’m seriously wondering if I’m going to go next year… probably won’t buy the full pack of tickets.

And I’m not the only one upset about it. Look at this thread that got everyone fired up about it in the local Flickr chapter, and this guy thinks it’s pretty Klassy too.

I’d wandered over the the media desk, but they had no info or details and couldn’t even tell me if I could get media access, especially since I’m not representing any media orgs. (‘course I could always argue that Apt613 publishes my stuff 😉

But I’m not happy about it at all. Even more so since security’s enforcement is almost nil at best. There’s still plenty of people wandering around with SLRs and no media passes – I know, I’m checking & asking. (Random tangent: I approached one guy who was accredited for Le Droit, and he actually knew my name… I wonder why.)

… still planning on shooting this weekend though, but I’ll have to depend on my Double-Dot All-Access pass for armor.

Some other Bluesfest fails:
– motorcycle policy change
– Barney Danson Theater tickets… never know when those events are going to cost extra, till you get to the door.
– Poor/little on-the-day location maps
– lousy website (iframes? 1999 called, they want their Netscape Communicator Gold back)
– website outages (after FavQuest told me they wouldn’t use Server North because they’d had issues with providers before. Okay! Enjoy your Amazon EC2!)