This past weekend was the Festival of Nations in St. Louis, a yearly weekend festival that is full of vendors, food, music, and arts. Certainly a great place to get photos from all sorts of angles, but I was happiest with the photos I got from the henna art station. To tell this mini-story I wanted the finished design to be in all the shots, so I kept that in mind as I was shooting. I also wanted a progression, so here is the first stroke:
ISO 1600 50mm f/5.6 1/1250
Then I walked around and was shooting from a spot behind:
ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640
Then I went with the finished product:
ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/500
Which now that you have seen the finished art, you can go back and see it on the paper as well. As I was shooting at the festival, I kept my ISO relatively high. This was because despite the bright sunlight, most of my shots were taken in the shade. I knew I wasn’t going to be too concerned with noise in the final versions of the photos so an ISO of 1600 pretty much guaranteed I could take shots everywhere. You will notice that even though these three shots that were taken in a similar area, I was changing my shutter speed a lot. After having set my ISO and also keeping my f-stop at a fixed 5.6, the shutter speed was how I was controlling the exposure on this particular outing.
When I got the photos home, I decided that I did not want to crop or sharpen them. I decided to apply a photo filter that replicates Polaroid 690 film. I felt that the slight color change and slightly grainy look was a good match with photos from a festival like this one. So that you can see the difference, here is the middle photo before editing:
ISO 1600 50mm 0ev f/5.6 1/640
It’s a subtle difference, do you think it adds to the story here? Feel free to comment below.
Cheers!
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