There is something beautifully unreasonable about wading through Laneway Festival with a fully mechanical Pentax K1000 around your neck while the sky tries to drown Centennial Park. Everyone else is firing off 20 frames a second at Blusher, The Belair Lip Bombs, Shady Nasty, Cavetown, Gigi Perez, Mt. Joy, Oklou, Jensen McRae, Alex G, The Dare, Role Model, Geese, Wet Leg and Wolf Alice like the cloud is about to repossess their memory cards. Meanwhile I’ve got 36 exposures of Fuji 400 and the emotional stability of a person who just realised film costs money.
The Pentax doesn’t care about hype. It doesn’t know that Wolf Alice are beneath a glittering star façade or that Wet Leg have outgrown the rooms I first saw them in. It certainly doesn’t care that The Dare is attempting to bend physics with a mic lead or that Role Model has summoned The Wiggles into the same timeline. It just sits there, all metal and stubbornness, waiting for me to get the exposure right while Cavetown strides down the runway and Jensen McRae detonates a front row into tears.
Shooting film here feels like arguing with time. Every time Cameron Winter of Geese leans into the mic, every time Blusher snap into choreography, every time Mt. Joy catch the clearing sky just right, I have to decide: is this worth one of my 36? No preview. No mercy. Just the click and the faint mechanical sigh of a shutter that has seen things.
And that’s the point. While the festival behaves like a beautifully curated nervous breakdown, the Pentax forces stillness. You don’t spray and pray. You commit. Fuji 400 soaks up the damp light, the grain hums, the colours bloom in ways digital politely refuses to. Somewhere between Alex G’s devotional singalongs and Wolf Alice under that disco ball, I stop chasing perfection and start chasing feeling.
Laneway at 21 is loud, soaked and hyperconnected. Film photography is none of those things. It is slow. It is stubborn. It demands faith. And in a park full of screens, it feels like rebellion to trust a roll of film and hope the light decides to be kind.
Go HERE to see the full review of Laneway 2026 in Sydney with digital photos.
Images Deb Pelser
