Every Pride week in Gothenburg, for a couple of years I've always missed out on the opportunity to attend West Pride. It's always something that comes up during that week, such as family matters, work, events or something else which had made me not been avalible that day.
This year, was my first time to attend West Pride to photograph the festivity and I'm so happy that I was able to go. Carol joined me to attend the event and we had a blast! First thing that happened that day was the West Pride Parade.
I didn't knew what to expect from the Parade. The only Pride parade I've experienced before was the one in London, which is much bigger than the ones in Sweden. Luckily, it was very nice weather during the most of the day. The only problem we had as photographers was that the light from the sun, which was very harsh. Harsh light is not the perfect light to photograph in.
We tried to see where on the route in town which would be the best spot for us to photograph at. It was hard to pick which spot since there was no shadow and the sun was shining right on the people walking the parade. We managed to get a decent spot for us to take photos.
It was so much fun seeing all the people that was there to see the parade and support the LGTB community in different ways. No matter what colour, sexual orientation, gender, age, religion, economics, everyone deserves equal rights.
When we first decided to attend West Pride, I had in mind that we only would take photographs of the parade since we have so much content already and need to not get too much content that only gets forgotten on the hard drive. But we didn't felt satisfied with the photos we had got of the parade so we decided to go to the event village to take part of the festivities there.
There were different sponsors, help organizations and other brands that were there to inform of different important LGBTQ topics. There were also tents where you could make buttons, bracelets and other things in the rainbows colours.
The main stage of the event where nearby as well and as we were walking around photographing there were different artists performing that evening. I wasn't thinking about photographing any concert photos but I couldn't help myself. I mean, I was on set so why not?
One of the performing acts were Oscar Zia. I have seen Oscar perform numerous times and this time I didn't do much effort in taking photos of him. It was tricky to shoot since there were so much smoke and I couldn't really get a good angle to get photos, so I just skipped it and only took some shots of him.
I was not aware of who was going to perform but suddenly a guy entered the stage with lots of energy and charisma. You could tell that he was not a Swede through that. His name was Johnathan Celestine and he got our attention. I had never heard of Johnathan before but I was liking what I heard from stage and I had to capture his performance.
The vibe on stage changed a lot compared to the other artists that were performing which was a positive thing.
Johnathan came down to greet the people who was there to support him. I took the opportunity to say hi and let him know how much I liked his performance and his energy on stage. I didn't had in mind to take selfies with him since there was so much people everywhere. But as nice as Johnathan was, he asked me if I wanted a picture and I felt rude to say no so here's a picture of us with my phone. :P
After Johnathan's performance, Carol and I decided to stick around to photograph a bit more around the audience and to capture the festivities.
I had so much fun photographing West Pride and I loved seeing all the fun and happy people everywhere. I'm definitely going to try to attend the event next year. It seems like next year, Europride will be hosted in Sweden which I'm very curious to see how big the festivity will be.
Big thank you to Carol for joining me to go to this event. It's always much more fun when you are with me!
I have more posts on it's way of other event's so stay tuned for more updates.
Until next time, ingat!
/Lizel
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