Manly Inflatable Boat Race at Shelly Beach
Event Photography
The Manly Inflatable Boat Race at Shelly Beach is exactly the kind of community event that makes Sydney’s Northern Beaches such a great place to live.
For one morning, the usually calm waters around Shelly Beach become a sea of giant unicorns, flamingos, ducks, palm trees and just about every inflatable creature imaginable.
Participants arrive in costumes, spectators pack the shoreline and the whole area takes on a festival atmosphere. It is colourful, slightly chaotic and impossible to watch without smiling.
For us at Koshka Media, it was also a brilliant community event to photograph.
Photographing the Manly Inflatable Boat Race
The concept of the race is wonderfully simple. Grab an inflatable, get into the water and somehow make your way around the roughly one-kilometre course.
Speed is not really the point. Some people paddle seriously. Others arrive on enormous unicorns and flamingos that seem to have very different ideas about which direction they should travel. Teams dress up, friends race alongside each other and plenty of participants spend almost as much time in the water as they do on their inflatables.
From a photography perspective, that unpredictability is what makes an event like this so much fun. Everywhere we looked something was happening. There were people paddling furiously, inflatables colliding, swimmers trying to catch their runaway floats and spectators cheering from the foreshore.
The Surf Rescue crews out on the water were also an important part of the scene, keeping an eye on the huge number of participants spread across the bay.
Community Event Photography From Land and Air
We photographed the Manly Inflatable Boat Race from both the shoreline and the air.
At water level, the focus was on people and moments. Costumes, laughter, splashing, paddling and the wonderfully competitive expressions of people trying to propel an inflatable flamingo across open water.
These closer photographs capture the personality of the event and the people who make it happen.
The wider perspective tells another part of the story.
From above Shelly Beach, the scale of the event becomes much clearer. Hundreds of colourful inflatables spread across the water while spectators gather along the shoreline and around the foreshore.
Combining ground photography with aerial coverage gives community events a much more complete visual story. You see both the individual moments and the environment in which they happen.
More Than Just a Race
Behind all the costumes and inflatable chaos is a community event with a meaningful purpose.
The Manly Inflatable Boat Race has a history of bringing people together while raising money for charitable causes, including Tour de Cure and cancer research.
That combination of fun, fundraising and community participation is a big part of what makes local events like this worth documenting.
The photographs are not only about what happened on the day. They become a visual record of the people, volunteers, spectators and organisations that helped make the event happen.
And in this case, they also happen to include an extraordinary number of inflatable unicorns.
Capturing Community Events Across Sydney
Community event photography is about much more than photographing a crowd.
The strongest coverage captures the atmosphere of the day. The big scenes establish where the event is happening, while closer photographs reveal the personalities, interactions and spontaneous moments that give an event its character.
At the Manly Inflatable Boat Race, that meant photographing everything from packed sections of Shelly Beach and colourful inflatables covering the water to paddlers, Surf Rescue crews, spectators and the small moments happening amongst all the chaos.
It was energetic, unpredictable and genuinely good fun to document.
For a community event, that is exactly the kind of story we want the photographs to tell.
Planning a community event, festival, fundraiser or public event in Sydney, the Northern Beaches or across NSW? Koshka Media provides professional event photography, video and aerial coverage that captures both the scale of your event and the people who make it memorable. Get in touch with us to discuss coverage for your next community event.
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