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I was tired from the all-day shoot from the previous day, but all my gear was in lab, and I had Noah Spies' 70-200/4L. When the Tech sent out a last-minute call for shooters to cover the annual Cambridge Carnival going on outside the doors of the Whitehead (known semi-affectionately as the 'head), I jumped on the assignment. Ended up on a full-page spread.
So I figured that the carnival's costume parade would be a good place to get a lot of colorful character shots, and also to justify the dual-camera harness outfit I was sporting that day. I figured I could make good use of the ultra-wide for perspective and the 70-200/4L for some detail shots. On my way out, I ran into my friend Liron and his girlfriend Fei, who were with another girl who, after some whispering, looked at me in surprise. Turns out she knew Joanne in high school. They were also looking for the parade, and were frustrated that it hadn't arrived on schedule.
Turns out that the parade
gets delayed every few meters from some operational problem, e.g.
speakers on a truck not functioning, costume failures, dancers with junk
in their eyes, and on and on (see photos above). So I was able to
hurry out to Central square and intercept them in a shaded portion of
the street (on the theory that the shadows would be less harsh, and
there was more than enough light to shoot handheld in the shade). While
there, I figured hey, I'm loaded down with gear like the biggest nerd
in the universe, and there's nothing like a press pass than two cameras
with large lenses strapped to you. So i ran out into the middle of the
parade and started shooting. This was a great idea from the general
effort to get off my ass and get the shot, but was a bad idea in that it
turns out a lot of those costumes have aluminum bar supports. What
happens is that the person supporting a huge headdress will stand more
or less still as a set of assistants literally moves a network of steel
rods around the street. The overall effect is that of a peacock
strutting for potential mates, which I guess was the point, but there
was a lot of ducking and weaving on my part to keep my head and lenses
from being bashed in.
Anyway, the interception
idea was a great one, because after the parade passed my first choke
point, I overtook them again at a downstream choke point and started all
over again. This second choke point was associated with better images
than the first (not clear why; probably I had gotten the settings down),
so I'm glad this worked out the way it did.
