I wandered into a bit of craziness earlier today. I had travelled into the city centre to do some photography and I had thought to myself: "It's a bank holiday, it should be nice an quiet". Of course I had forgotten that the Woman's Mini Marathon was on today. Well, it's not that I had forgotten, I just didn't think it was anywhere near where I was going. I couldn't have been more wrong. So, instead off taking some stately architectural shots I instead switched gears into street photography mode. I had wanted to try out some new techniques for getting around some of the issues with the X-Pro1 (more on that tomorrow) so this turned out to be a good opportunity.
As I walked in by the park, past the marathon route, I thought that things were fairly quiet ...
A few people were heading here and there, and the race route was still being set up. Bear in mind this was at least four hours before the race was due to start.
Given the look on the faces of some of the entrants, at this stage I was beginning to wonder if the race had been held earlier and it was all over.
There were tourists about heading to their hotel clearly wondering what the hell was going on… (he looks like a german Bill Bailey)
Things got somewhat busy at the top of Grafton Street. The obligatory street performer wasn't helping the flow of people, that's for sure. It's good to see that after thousands of years of evolution fire still draws a crowd.
Ooo, ladder walking. Bring back the flames!
"Yes, Can I help you?"
"It's a banana, honest"
I bet she's thinking "I could kick him, you know"
While I do wonder what the girl is doing in the foreground (I presume taking a picture) I'm more interested in what looks like a fight about to break out behind her
You have to wonder what just happened to the left of camera?
"I'm telling you, we could hop on the back of that van, no one would know"
Nice hair!
You know it's tourist season when the Leprechauns come out.
Aren't you supposed to hide your pot of gold?
Anyway, that's about it. I was getting a bit claustrophobic at this stage so I decided to change my plan and go shopping instead. I did learn a few interesting things about the camera though. I'm putting together a blog post on a few tips and tricks and hopefully I'll have that up in a few days, so stay tuned.
If you were wondering how these were processed I converted the RAW files to Tiffs using Fuji's "Raw Converter" (silkypix) and then brought the images into Aperture. The "looks" are from a new version of my film candy presets (shameless plug) that I'm working on.
