St Georges day parade #photography

It’s St George’s Day on Thursday, but the events were last weekend. This is the Stone Cross St George’s day parade in West Bromwich. When I’m photographing an event, I try to tell a story in pictures and then add words to the story.

You can at least see there were a lot of people and a security and police presence to organise everything.

I used a 55 – 300 mm lens so I could zoom in to get shots like this. The focusing isn’t great, but it doesn’t matter, you can see the crowd.

It was cloudy and the light wasn’t very good and I was freezing, the wind really made my fingers cold. I even went back to the car and got fingerless gloves to wear. I wanted to get some close ups of the pipers and the people leading the parade.

I think it’s important to capture the spirit of the event and close ups like this seem to do that better. Events like these are good because there is a lot of colour.

I intend to photograph a few events through the summer. The people make the summer events interesting, so try to do close ups of the people. I photographed an event on Saturday too and was able to use the 18-105 mm lens and so got better pictures. It was a sunny day too, so that helped.

Occasionally people stop and are aware of the camera or stop and pose. At an event, you can’t fiddle about getting the right camera setting, you just keep shooting with a fast speed, so a wide aperture too. The wide aperture means you might only get one person in focus with a shot like this. They are reasonable pictures though considering the poor light. The press photographer who took pictures earlier had people posing  so got better pictures. I had to photograph them on the move, but that is more interesting.

Not many people smiled for the camera, but they were probably cold too! It was the first time I had photographed this event; next time I’ll probably use the 18 – 105 mm lens and maybe take the speedlight too. I’ll wear a thicker sweater as well!

That’s it for today, I hope you enjoyed this post and it has inspired you to photograph a few events through summer. You can follow this blog, comment or follow me on twitter for updates.

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