It’s good at least occasionally to have a rest from more serious events, and International Pillow Fight Day provided that on April 7.
It was hard to pick out a single image from the many I took during the 30 minutes, though the set does I think give a good idea of the event.
I first photographed International Pillow Fight Day in March 2008, when the London event took place in Leicester Square.
It was perhaps a little easier then to get in among the midst of things as the fight was in a slightly more confined space, and it was easier to take photographs because there were relatively few photographers present. This year there were hordes of us, and rather a lot of those taking part were busily performing for the press rather than just getting on with having a good time belting hell out of each other with their pillows. The pillow fight day is an idea of the urban playground movement, which aims to get people off the couch and taking part in things, and I’m not sure that I think acting up for the media is really much better than being a passive consumer of it. People should get on with their own thing.
This year I had some technical problems. My D300 suffered a mirror lock-up – which it frequently does – and in the heat of the moment I couldn’t clear this. Normally it’s simply a matter of using the menu item which is supposed to lock it up for cleaning, pressing the shutter release to lock it up, then turn the camera off for it to come back down into place. But the menu item was greyed out and unavailable. Once I had time to think about it I realised that this simply meant the battery was getting low, but in the heat of the pillow fight I simply thought the thing had finally given up the ghost. I’d been intending to use the10.5mm fisheye and get in really close, but only managed a single frame during the actual fight before the camera locked up.
My one frame at the start of the fight with the 10.5mm
I was also perhaps a little nervous about my equipment, having just got a new Nikon SB700 flash, I carefully put it away in my bag before the feathers started to fly. If you photograph in the middle of things, pillow fights can get pretty physical, and I didn’t want it to get damaged before I’d really had a chance to use it. Although my cameras stood up well to a little battering, I did get the D300 I was holding to my eye hit hard by a pillow and knocked into my upper lip, which hit a tooth and I was photographing for a few minutes with blood dripping.
I’ve also photographed a pillow fight that had a more straightforward purpose, in January 2011 outside Walthamstow station over the plans by developers Solum Regeneration to build a 14 storey hotel and 8 storey blocks of flats.
It was rather too spread out to generate the same kind of energy as the larger events, and that shows in the pictures.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
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