Carnival!

To continue on the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival after yesterday's Mardis Gras there was something new this year a Carnival on Princes Street & Princes Street Gardens.

The rumor was that there would be a Parade down the mound, along Princes Street and into the Gardens, I'm not sure where this rumour came from but that wasn't exactly how it worked. I headed into town early where I found Princes St. closed to traffic and fencing already in place. As the time got closer more and more people were crowded along the fence expecting a parade, by 1pm Princes St. was seriously packed with people and bands had taken up positions along Princes Street at different positions. At 2pm some of the bands started to play and the crowd started to mill around aimlessly trying to follow the music, everybody was clearly confused as to where the parade was (many people had been waiting at the barriers for some time).

It turned out that there was no "parade", each band would play for a few minutes at a particular spot and then move on to the next (this meant people waiting at the barrier between the stations could not see the performances), the groups moved around in a large circle along Princes Street and the Gardens, stopping to play at each "station".

After negotiating a very crowded bottleneck to get into the gardens and having established how the "cavalcade" worked we found a spot and waited for each band to come to us in turn. This actually worked pretty well and if only it had been mapped out and explained things would not have been so chaotic and crowded to start with!

At the end of the afternoon, most of the bands gathered in front of the Ross Band Stand (in Princes St. Gardens, with the Castle as a backdrop) for a massive grand finale that seemed to last for ages (in a good way), I was amazed how the performers kept up the energy for so long. I was also amazed at how many performers from different bands managed to synchronize together so well, it was very difficult to select a single image for the day, I got some good shots of individual players and bands, I also got some wide shots of the end finale (but they lacked detail). So I selected this image which I hope shows the energy and colour of the day (plus it's got a couple lovely young ladies in rather attractive outfits ;-)

All in all it was a really good day and hopefully will be repeated again next year, knowing how the "cavalcade" works in advance will hopefully avoid the early confusion.

On the down side, my camera kept failing :-( After taking a few images it would stop and report an error, saying the camera could not communicate with the lens and to clean the lens contacts. If I switched off the camera and removed the lens, then re-attached the lens it would work a couple times and fail again :'-( Hopefully it is something simple as I can't afford to buy a new lens at the moment.

(Blimey this has turned into a Blog report, I'll stop now!)