This year's parade route takes the procession northbound along Howe Street, then eastward along Smithe, before heading down Granville.
Thinking myself smart, I stationed myself at Howe and Smithe, with a due-south head-on view right down the middle of Howe Street. Such a vantage point ought to minimize any difficult-to-capture horizontal motion, or so I thought.
Well, was I ever wrong. I've come to the conclusion that taking good parade pictures is no easy task. Aside from all the movement and the fat-headed spectators and officials who obscure the line of sight, the number one determinant of good or bad shots is definitely location.
The problem with where I was situated was that the participants and pipe bands were already starting to make their turn onto Smithe well before the crosswalk, amounting to close-up horizontal motion and prematurely turned heads [did I just coin a new phrase?]. And this was the killer: because I was looking right down the middle of Howe Street, this meant capturing a swath of sky and then having to override the camera's meter reading depending on whether the sky was cropped out of the frame or not. I was constantly fiddling with the exposure compensation button on the camera and messing up. (A fixed exposure setting would have been of no use because the incident light was variable.)
As it turned out, the best pics were those taken post-parade, at the stalls. Today also marked my first foray into candid street photography, a scary endeavour not for the meek or socially inept.
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A Celtic Celebrant Eating Sushi
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