Parade Photography

I'll be at the Saints' parade tonight but I'm going to enjoy it and just see if I get a few decent shots with my compact Canon SD780 IS. Many of you may want to do some parade shooting in darkness between now and next Tuesday so I'll share some of my thoughts on setting your DSLR for float photos.

 

The thing you want to notice about the above photograph of the Endymion parade in 2008 is a feature of all the parades that roll at night. The floats are rather brightly illuminated. You're shooting at night but your subject has brought along its own lighting. 

 

You'll still want to shoot with a very high ISO. You probably have an available ISO setting up around 3200. Get on up there. I wouldn't worry about the noise that starts creeping in to the dark areas at the high ISOs unless you think you're going to get a real winner that you'll enlarge to hang on a wall. The high ISO will give you a lot more room to play with the shutter speed and aperture.

The high ISO will also let you use a relatively fast shutter. That's going to be necessary because everything in your shot will be moving constantly. You may still have to use a shutter speed as slow as 1/60 which will give you some blurring especially of the arms waving or throwing things. In the shot above I was set at 1/50 sec @ f5.6  but I got a moment when the arms in the picture were reaching up, paused or out of view.

 

The shot above was taken at 1/100 sec @ f5.0 ISO 800. There's still some blurring of the waving hands. 

In case you haven't noticed: your zoom lens may have a maximum aperture that changes as you increase the focal length. You lens used in the above shot has a max of 3.5 at 28mm but 5.6 at 300mm. That's another reason I suggest going high on the ISO to free up the other settings.

Another decision you want to make is your file size. If you shoot in RAW mode you'll have better luck retrieving some detail from the dark areas of your picture in the editing process. You'll also take up a lot more space per picture on your memory card. Any of the non-RAW settings will result in a JPEG which will be compressed and sharpened in camera and less flexible in the developing process.

Another very logical option is to set your camera, even your compact point-and-shooter on a picture style setting like "night" or whatever you have and just shoot away and hope for the best. So tonight I'll take a few shots just in case I get a good one but I'm going mainly to enjoy celebrating with friends and thanking the Saints for a wonderful season. I'm thinking this is going to be an expensive off-season for Mr. Benson.