Last year, I got some nice photos of the wonderful Copenhagen Pride Parade. So this year I had planned to do it even better. Unfortunately, I did not have time to go through with my intended project, but I still managed to take some photos at the parade. Hopefully I also learned something from last year, being:

• Make eye contact with people, smile to them and thank them by waving or doing thumbs up afterwards.
• Do I want a short DOF or a long DOF? – Always think about the aperture. Lots of pictures from last year had either too large (only bokeh outside of subject’s face) or too small an aperture (too much details of the background). The challenge is to be able to tell from the scenery whether the background will add to the image or only distract.
• Get closer to the people! If you get closer, you will also get better eye contact and a closer presence of the person.
• Be realistic and don’t shoot thousands of pictures – when am I gonna take the time to sort and post process these? I took over 3000 pictures last time – this time I shot around 500. I’ll be the first one to admit taking loads and loads of pictures – it’s also a really good method of improving yourself as a photographer (I’ll maybe write about that later) – but at a point I just felt I had to go the other way, trying to be more effective on the “great pics / # of shots” scale.
• Think about where the (strong summer-) light is and choose where to stand. I did not remember this as much as I should have.

Check my photos out below and please let me know which one you like the best.

Best regards /Björn

More of that to come, but I wanted to dedicate this post to panorama photography. I shot some panorama material, not much that turned out OK, but this one is pretty neat. The dynamic range was huge, so I shot with bracketing in order to be able to do some HDR cheating afterwards. But back with my laptop on the boat, I found out that I did not need to combine the exposures anyways – the middle one was perfect. I prefer to do my stitching in PTGui, but my PTGui beta version did not wanna run, and just told me that I needed to upgrade – pretty frustrating when you have no Internet access. So the job was given to Adobe Photoshop CS3, which did an amazing job.

Post processing: Sharpen, crop and some S-curves with masks on sky and select parts of the snow.

As I wrote in my previous post, I was to the Copenhagen Carneval 2009, which took place last weekend. I finally sat down and went through all the photos to find some gems. The photos shown here are taken with D300 and either 85mm AF or 105mm AF VR. Enjoy!

Click on the image for a bigger version.

Photoset on Flickr

I took lots of photos, some incorrectly exposed, some out of focus, but lots of them pretty OK. Christopher, a colleague told me to start doing manual exposure, but I did not dare because I wanted to be able to seize the moment. However I can see from my result that it is just as high a risk to let the D300 measure the light. (That’s my experience at least, maybe if I go for spot measurement I could learn to do it more precisely.) Next time manual exposure. Promise!

Now I will sort again among the >1000 pictures to find some good ones to post. As Homestar would put it – Booowing. But you get a teaser in the meantime. One of the over-exposed shots, which I actually think turned out pretty cool.

Kaizers.no