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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  Is it something like using outdated film for its coolness?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



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