A few weekends ago I attended the Landskrona Carnival with the parents who hadn’t been there before (I’ve been before, but not the actual parade part…which was the main reason we went). It turned out to be quite an interesting and entertaining experience, not to mention a challenging one, photography wise.

I had lent my dad my 18-200 mm zoom lens, since his is no longer working, so I was using only my 50 mm on my Canon 600D. Yep, I was shooting digital again…it seems to be something I’ve gotten back to this summer, at least a little bit. No worries though, I am still using my analog gear as well. It’s just that when you expect a boatload of colors and action my black and white analog setup doesn’t really work that well!

In the end I came home with over 500 images on the memory card, and that was a bit excessive, even for me in spray and pray mode! The reason I took that many pics was the fixed focus lens I was using. I couldn’t zoom with that fixed focus lens or really move from my spot to get good coverage of the performers. So many times I had someone stick a hand or a leg or other body parts into the frame…not to mention the infernal cell phones from audience members! Of course that came back to bite me in the butt later with all the editing I had to do to whittle away at the heap of pictures, but I knew that would be part of the experience, so it wasn’t that big a deal (although it did take me two days of clicking X for “discard” in Lightroom to get it down to a manageable lot!

What struck me about the parade was the cosmopolitan vibe, the multitude of colors and how much fun everyone seemed to have as they danced and played their way through the streets. Although I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that Landskrona could show people from all over the world, given the multi-ethnic backgrounds of many of their citizens!

First some pre-parade pictures that I took as we made our way to a good spot to view the parade…