Skip to main content

H St Festival

I was hired to cover the H St festival in Washington D.C.  It was a nice festival. hordes of crowd and food everywhere.  My assignment was not to cover the festival but to capture the interesting subjects that will be attending.  The look should be more realistic with natural lighting.

It was cloudy most of the day so it created nice soft lighting.  It did drizzle a bit but that did not stop the crowd from enjoying the day.

By the way, does anybody know when Pabst Blue Ribbon made a comeback?  Everybody was drinking that stuff at the festival!  In my days we only drank that stuff because we couldn't afford anything else...  Is it something like using outdated film for its coolness?


50 1.2L Canon 5dMK2 


The challenge was to shoot these real people in a way so others in the festival would not be too recognizable.  The reason is since it can be used for commercial purposes, we needed model releases.  Can you imagine getting release for all the people if you shoot wide with a small f-stop where everything is in focus?

That's why I opted to get tight "portraits" type of compostion with shallow depth of focus. 35mm 1.4L 

I love my 35 1.4 and 50 1.2. It lets me capture what I want to depict in the picture.  The shallow depth of focus let me blur out backgrounds that can be distracting. 

What's a festival without a tattooed guy grilling something? 50mm 1.2L

Keeping my angle low kept the guys in a cleaner background.  35mm 1.4L

Nuff said. 50mm 1.2L

They brought props! 35mm 1.4L

He didn't feel like walking anymore. 50mm 1.2L

The sun peeked out just long enough to get some in the golden light. 50mm 1.2L



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Large Format ...Slight Return

Took out my Linhof 4x5 field camera out for a spin. Tripod, cable release, focusing cloth, loupe, lightmeter, and film holders! The gang's all here. Linhof Technica III, (circa 1940's) with Fujinon 150mm 5.6 a modern lens design.  Bull Run Park near Manassas VA.The camera is wonderfully made with machined aluminum with German engineering. Like Butter. Working with a 4x5 is a whole different world. It takes long to set up and there are so many things that you can screw up. "Did I cock the shutter? check focus?, meter reading, dark slide out? lock the movements?... There are like 13 different steps that you have to make to take a picture.  So why do it when I can just point my 5d and shoot in easy one two steps?  Reasons may vary, but I do it because of the camera movements. The tilts, swings, shifts. These cameras were made so you can technically control how the image hits the film plane. You can achieve "technically perfect" images, whatever that means. 
5 comments
Read more

Polaroid Negative?

I've been wanting to do color large format for awhile. When there were photo labs around the corner, it wasn't hard to do a E-6 process in a day or two. Now that process has gotten expensive and if you're doing sheet film, its even more pain. So my solution... Polaroid! well technically, it should be called "instant film" since Polaroid is trademarked term. I'm using  Fuji FP 100c45. But here's the twist. I wanted a different look. If I want true colors, I wouldn't bother with the cost of 2 bucks per shot.  I also was fascinated with some surface texture that I saw on polaroids.  I recently came across some sites that talks about turning a polaroid into negatives. Its true that Polariod years ago did have those positive/negative film, but they've discontinued all instant film a couple of years ago.   The process is simple. you take bleach and take off the black stuff on the part that you throw away.  Once the black part is off, you have a negati
5 comments
Read more

Boston: B&W Architecture with Leica Q2M: From a Purist Perspective.

I swear I was going to switch out my black and white ONLY Leica Q2M to a regular Q2 color camera before going to this trip.  I"m glad I didn't.   Oh, before I forget, take a look at my icandy slide shows .  I will be making slideshows that is designed for big screen TV's.  Take a look at this one: Ok, back to the topic on hand.  So one of the most asked question about the Leica Q2M is, 'why limit yourself to just black and white when you can easily convert color photos to BW?'  Very good question.  My answer is,  if you know with certainty you want the best quality BW image possible, you want the dedicated monochrome camera.  Am I being a staunch purist? or is there a practical argument for it? Let's talk about it.  Beacon Street Boston,  MA One of many beautiful architecture on that hill.   First, this camera doesn't have any moire filter on the sensor.  Moire filters are on most color camera sensors to get rid of those annoying repeating patterns that loo
Post a Comment
Read more