The San Francisco Carnaval attracts thousands of spectators every years. It’s a great event, high in color and music and features many groups of different ethnicities from both South and North America.
This was my first photo field trip organized by the Palo Alto Camera Club. Our club’s co-President had managed to give us access to the line-up, thanks to her daughter who was performing with the “Energia Do Samba“. I will post a few more photos later. I took about 1,200 shots over a period of 10 hours, but that’s because I’m still learning about what makes a good shot versus a not-so-good. I’ve since made some progress and taking much less shots in a day :-))
Below are some views taken around 8:00AM on May, 28th 2006.
When I went back and started to select my best images, this one got my attention. I liked the “family portrait”, the colors and the composition were also pleasing me. Each one of the 6 characters in this scene has his or her own action going on and still they are all connected.
Nikon D50 • Nikkor 18-70 • 35 mm • 1/125s • f/5.6 • ev 0
5.28.2006 8:46AM
Some aspects were bothering me though: I didn’t like the woman in blue in the background and the portable toilet. I also found that I was missing some foreground space, the picture is cut to tight at the bottom.
So I did some PhotoShop edits… Added a Curve Layer to add a vignette effect around the frame to help focus to the main scene, added a little bit more concrete to the foreground, cropped out the toilets…
Here is the final edit that I submitted to the Palo Alto Camera Club competition on June, 7th 2006 in the Photojournalism category and got the 3rd place.
Here is my layer palette in PhotoShop for that file:
I recently submitted this picture to the 2006 annual competition, in the Photojournalism category, and was granted an “Honorable Mention”, which I’m very proud of and honored!
Here is the presentation of this photo at the annual award ceremony (which I couldn’t attend) by Dan Quinn, club co-President. I think this photo was taken by Laurie.