Pick the right equipment

The first thing you'll need to figure out is what camera to pick for a weekend camping in foreign fields. We'll assume you're pretty serious about your photography, so we'll discount compact cameras and head straight for a digital SLR. The two big names worth looking at here are Nikon and Canon. In the Nikon range, the amateur photographer will be inevitably drawn to the D70, the newer D70s or the budget-priced D50. The D70 has received consistently good reviews and has a huge fan base, if Internet postings are anything to go by. Alternatively, Canon's EOS 350D is widely considered to be on a par with the D70, and some photographers have found it gives better performance in low light than the Nikon SLRs.

For our Glastonbury experience, we took the Nikon D70. British festivals often turn into wild dervishes of mud slinging, and even when it's dry there can be a lot of dust in the air. For this reason, we suggest you pop a UV filter onto the lens. Although this does relatively little to alter the photo quality, it does mean that errant branches scratch the glass on a cheap UV filter and not your expensive SLR lens.

As with all people-spotting, a zoom lens works wonders for photographing subjects when you don't want to intimidate them or yourself. Although we made do with the 18-70mm lens bundled with our D70, we did long for a more powerful zoom lens. If you can afford one, bring it along, otherwise you'll just have to do what we did to get this shot: forget your self-consciousness and get right into the thick of the action.