Year of the Rabbit

[David Porter]

Celebrating Chinese New Year in Chatham Kent UK. The Medway Towns, of which Chatham is a part, is one of the biggest areas for Chinese cultural activities in the UK outside of London.

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[Ken Cox]

MICK

great colours -- you have an eye for beauty - make a copy for the organizers, great PR!

ken

[colin hill]

Mick,

As Ken said, it looked like a very colourful parade. The kids, it appeared were having great fun from the

smiles and laughter on their faces. It appears you have a fairly large Chinese community in your area.

Thanks for sharing this happy amd colorful moment.

Colin

[Hubert]

Mick,

A nice overview of a colorful parade.

Good expressions along with nice colors.

The music was very appropriate.

But it is not easy to produce high quality pictures during such a parade.

In most of the pictures the background is a bit distracting.

Means a small DOF (Depth of Field) may be more effective.

Use a low f-number, f 2.8 or 3.5, keep some distance and zoom in on the subject.

Sometimes it is better not to show as much as possible but to show less.

If you use a flashlight at full power some bright areas will burn out,

which means the structure of the surface isn't visible anymore (totally white).

To demonstrate what I mean I captured a pic from your slideshow and enhanced it a bit in photoshop.

Have a look at the top sleeves on the shoulder.

Well-meant,

Hubert

[David Porter]

Thanks Hubert for the advice and working on the photo. I do like how you have subdued the background which brings out the subjects although not sure about the skin tones - I actually like the pink blush.

As you say, not easy photographing a parade especially running along the route getting between people to grab a shot. I just put the camera on Auto as I don't think a wide aperture would have been appropriate for all shots and I think I would have missed many shots had I kept adjusting aperture/speed etc. I will have a go in PS on some of the better shots to see if I can improve them but it will take me a little time and I wanted to get the show out in reasonable proximity to the event. Thanks for your input which will go into my knowledge back for future use.

[rmstevens]

Hi Mick,

Very much enjoyed this AV capturing well the colourful carnival with well chosen music and correct duration. However I fully agree with Hurbert’s comments. This type of photography is always going to be difficult and I know you are not keen but the rewards of using Photoshop to crop then selected the background, feather edges, Gaussian blur, desaturate and darken are well worth it. Once you get familiar with the technique you will be surprised how quickly it can be done! Attached took less than 10 minutes.

Regards, Roger

[David Porter]

Hi Roger,

Good to hear from you and thanks for spending time to input. I do take your point about distracting backgrounds but in this case, as it was a show about a parade through the streets, I am not particularly concerned about the backgrounds, in fact they are part of the show really. Having said that, I have reviewed the show and do find that some of the early shots were taken against really ugly backgrounds and I will have a go at improving them.

Actually, I am not too bad at Photoshop and do use it quite a lot for individual photos that I want to print out or put on my or others websites. When it comes to slideshows, I may well get too involved with these technicalities and overlook photo quality.