One World Week – Carnival

So I was called to help out last minute, because the One World Week people needed photographers.

President of Warwick Illusion right after performing a paper-cutting illusion.

All things considered, it wasn’t one of the better conditions I’ve found myself having to take photos in. The event started proper at about 7pm in the evening, so it was dark. It was also surprisingly cold, so my fingers were almost too numb to feel the shutter release. There were floodlights, but they were quite small, and set to strobe throughout the performances, meaning that I was restricted to taking my photos in time with the strobing. Throw in the crowds milling around and jostling me while I was working, and all in all, it was a somewhat challenging evening.

Took a bit of repositioning and stretching to get the flag in the background where it is, but it was totally worth it.

For pretty much the entire evening, I was working with my 50mm 1.4. Eventually, I had settings floating around a 1/100s shutter speed, F/1.8, ISO 800. It probably helped that I was shooting in RAW as well, so I could bump the exposure around a bit after the fact. Because I also figured I needed to be moving around quite a bit as well, I used a monopod instead of a tripod. Glad I did – there probably wouldn’t have been enough space for a fully extended tripod anyway.

If I recall correctly, one of the dancers from the Carribean Dance Society.

 Of course, the problem with photographing performances at night is that the use of flash isn’t a good idea, since the last thing you want to do is distract the performers. In that sense, the floodlights were important if any photos were to be taken at all.

The Warwick Devils, our university's cheerleaders.

But if there’s one thing that darkness does help – it’s long exposures.

One day, someone is going to keep their body still for half a second when they're spinning fire, and it'll be awesome.

 It’s been busy, but hopefully I’ll have more up at some point. Until then, have a nice day. 😀