Photography: Sydney Royal Easter Show 2014

It used to be a family tradition of ours to visit the Sydney Royal Easter Show each year, with it being held near the time of my birthday. However, over the past few years, I’ve “grown out” of it, because it just didn’t represent value for money. Things like showbags were just filled with low quality novelty items and stuff they’re trying to get rid of. Food is always overpriced, and mostly of low quality.

However, this year, my mum wanted to go and wanted someone to go with, so I ended up going. I decided to make it a photography day, trying my best to photograph animals. Unfortunately, some animals (e.g. rabbits, dogs) are behind cages at a long distance making them impossible to photograph well. The poultry was one of the main exceptions, as we could walk right up to the cage and admire the variation in plumage and cresting.

I think this year, the show was more commercialized than ever before, with extra costs for reserved seating in woodchopping, for some food tasting, food cups in the petting zoo, etc. Even the entertainment in the stadium was running late, prefixed with loops of advertisements playing on the massive LED screen. I don’t remember it being this commercialized in the past.

But I also think they didn’t do as well as they thought they would, even with the royal visit, it didn’t break record numbers. It was evident from the lack of queues for the showbag pavillion that there really wasn’t much excitement. We left without a single showbag, but with quite a few pictures.

Most of the photos were taken in rather difficult conditions – low lighting, between cage bars or through dirty perspex with animals that continually move. But still, some of the images turned out much better than expected. Enjoy!