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Archives for May 2015

Photographing in crowded environments

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This blog has been relatively quiet for the last few weeks. The reason is I have been busy covering some festivals and carnivals.  Early this month, I was covering a gathering of Venetian costumes in the beautiful gardens of Annevoie in Belgium.
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For me this was a follow-up of my attending the Carnival in Venice last February. Last week I was at the 30th kite festival in Ostende (also in Belgium)
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and last week-end I attended the LGBT festival in Brussels :

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Three different instances with one common point : Making great pictures is complicated by the necessity of dealing with large crowds. I thought it might be useful some advice that are usually present in most instances :

1/ Arrive early and/or stay late.
In such events there is usually an official parade of some kind. In my experience this is rarely the time to make the best images. if People are in a defile, your mobility is going to be reduced and even if you can get in the middle of it (press card,luck,..) your subjects are usually looking on both sides to wave at the crowd behind the barricades. Better images are possible when you arrive before the walk officially starts
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A tip for photographers

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As photography is my full-time occupation, I own a fair number of cameras. They tend to differ in brand, features and weight but those days most of my cameras are small mainly because of my frequent journeys by commercial plane. Airlines tend to enforce strictly carry-on rules nowadays and a large and heavy system is of no use to me when working overseas. People who want a carry-everywhere camera share the same desire for small cameras even if for different reasons. But it is not always obvious from an article in a paper or a review on the web to know how small a small camera truly is. Of course, you can easily get dimensions of a camera but what you really need sometimes is how small a camera that you lust for is compared to the camera you have or compared to another one you may consider buying. Well, fortunately there is a very good site for you to visualize size of a camera compared to another. There maybe several of them  but I find that this one here  is really the best. It is very user friendly and is updated regularly with new cameras. Most cameras can be viewed next to each other from different sides  and you can see the dimensions by clicking on the product. Most products are classified by their full model name and alphabetically within a brand . However, latest additions are not always ranked alphabetically within their own brand so scroll-down the full list before thinking the model you are looking for is not here. You can see what a page may look like. You can move the products within the page by clicking on the small arrows in the little black strip with the camera name in it. You can remove one camera by clicking on the yellow arrow in the same black strip
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For cameras with interchangeable lenses, you have a scroll-down list to attach the lens. A little trick : if comparing two or more cameras side by side is not enough you can click and  drag one on top of the other to see both superimposed for a few seconds.
When choosing a camera , it is always better to hold the camera in your own hands to see how it feels but this website is certainly a nice tool.
Happy Pictures !