Last 8th of May I shot the 2007 Burning of the Ribbons Parade (lit. translation of Cortejo da Queima das Fitas, more info here. This is the 3rd year I’ve shot the parade and I’ve evolved from a Sony DSC-V1 to a mighty Canon 350D (mighty as prosumer goes… as of 2 years ago) with a Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4.5 attached.

The shots you see above have been edited, all of the “clean” shots are available here @ flickr

Gear:

• Canon 350D

• Sigma 17-70mm f2.8-4.5

• Canon EF 50mm f1.4 (just hauled it, didn’t use it)

• 2x 1GB Sandisk Ultra II CF Cards

• 430EX Canon Flash

• 8x Ansmann 2700mAh AA batteries

• Black Domke F3-X Camera Bag

Last year I only used the 350D with the 50mm f1.4 and even though it’s an excellent setup for portrait, it rendered group shots under crowded conditions nearly impossible and the lack of a proper flash meant blown backgrounds for back lit shots and shadows on peoples faces (considering a great deal of them are wearing top hats during this particular parade).
Later photoshop work was required to brighten a lot of not so exposed faces…

This time though, the use of flash allowed me to have great exposures specially under tricky conditions like people with the sun on their backs.
I wanted to have soft lightning on the shots so nearly all of them are taken with a bounced flash from a white card attached to the flash set to a 45 degrees of tilt or larger.

All frames were shot as JPG (not enough room to shoot RAW on this scale, but 2x 4Gb Sandisk Ultra II are now on the shopping list) with auto WB.