The night my screen died: shooting Jungle in the rain

Some shows you plan for. Some shows the weather plans for you.

I shot Jungle at Roskilde in July 2024, and about a minute into the set the rain came down hard. For a band called Jungle, it felt almost too fitting. One moment the field was grey and waiting, the next it was a proper downpour, fat drops bouncing off shoulders, ponchos, and the barrier.

The crowd had it worse than I did. A lot of these people had been standing in the same spot for hours to get near the front for an artist they love, and now they were doing it cold and soaked. The thing about Roskilde, and Danish festival crowds in general, is that they are used to it. Plenty of people came prepared, rain jackets on, ponchos out, and not one of them left. They had waited too long to be chased off by some water.

I was less prepared than the audience. I had brought my Canon, the same one I have written about before, the camera we started Coda on. What I did not have was a proper rain cover. So I did what you do: pulled my poncho over the camera and kept shooting from underneath it.

It lasted about a minute.

When the screen dies mid-set

The first thing to go was the rear screen. Not the whole camera, just the display, which sounds minor until you realise how much you lean on it. The Jungle stage was high, and from the photo position the only way to frame was to hold the camera up over my head and compose on the screen. My eye at the viewfinder was too low to see anything but the underside of the stage. No screen meant no eye on the frame.

But I could still hear it. The shutter was firing every time I pressed it. The camera was still making photos, it just could not show them to me. So I made a call a lot of photographers will recognise: I kept going. Held the camera up over the crowd, pointed it where Jungle was, and shot blind. No preview, no checking the back, just the sound of the shutter and a guess at the framing.

Is that bad for the camera? Honestly, a bit

Worth being straight about this, because the answer is not "it's fine." Water and camera electronics do not mix. Even weather-sealed bodies are only resistant, not waterproof, and most entry and mid-level cameras, our old Canon included, have very little sealing at all. When rain gets in, the usual first casualties are exactly what I lost: the screen, then buttons going unresponsive, then in the worst case the electronics shorting out for good.

This time I got lucky. It turned out to be nothing serious. The Canon dried out overnight and I was using it again the next day like nothing had happened. But it does not always go that way, and that night taught me a few things I now do without thinking. I keep a cheap rain sleeve in my bag, a few euros and it weighs nothing. I put a UV filter on so the front element takes the hits instead of the glass I care about. I carry silica gel and a sealed bag for the trip home so the camera dries out instead of sitting damp. And I do not change lenses out in the open, because that is the moment water reaches the sensor. A poncho is better than nothing, but it is not a plan, and now I have one.

Why I love the Jungle photos anyway

Here is the part that makes the whole soggy story worth it. The frames came out better than the ones I would have taken in clean, dry light.

Shooting blind through a downpour did something the conditions handed me for free. The photos are full of motion: streaks of stage light caught in the falling rain, soft blurs where drops crossed the lens, the whole image slightly dissolved at the edges. You can see the rain everywhere, fat drops lit up against the dark. It looks like the weather, not like a press shot of the weather. For a band called Jungle, it could not have been more fitting.

They are also photos that reward being seen on a big screen. On a phone they just read as moody. Full screen, or printed large, you catch all of it: every lit droplet, every streak of light, the texture the rain put into the whole frame. That is when they really land.

You don't get to pick the weather

That is the deal with European festivals. You do not get to choose. One show you are sweating through your shirt under a flat blue sky, sun blowing out every highlight, wishing for a single cloud. The next you are holding a camera over your head in a Danish downpour watching your screen die. Berlin heat one weekend, Jungle in the rain the next.

You learn to shoot both. And every so often the bad weather hands you a better photo than the good weather ever would.

Jungle's set is on coda.photos. The rain is in every frame, and it's worth opening them big.