Shadowplay Photography

Well last weekend was the annual Mermaid Parade at Coney Island. It rained, but not the whole time. It’s always a lot of fun shooting this event. All the colorful locals get dressed up (or down depending) and have a grand old time marching down Surf Avenue. This year was rainy as I mentioned, but it cleared up after the first half hour or so. I didn’t get any running make-up shots like I expected, but it turned out to be a productive shoot anyway. See my Flickr page here for the gallery.

On a technical note: shooting with the 5DM2 in the light rain caused no problems, even though people have complained online about poor weather sealing. Of course I was nervous about the whole time. All the shots were taken at ISO 400 with the excellent Canon 70-200 f2.8 L IS. Noise levels at ISO 400 were almost nonexistent which helped as the light was generally low. Also, almost everything was shot at f2.8, not because of low light, but I wanted paper thin depth of field to separate the participants from the crowd in the background.

Last week (actually I’ve been sitting on this post for about a month now), I was lucky enough to snag one of the few Canon 5D Mark II’s floating around. Even three months after its initial release the supply is still quite scarce. Even spare batteries are out of stock everywhere (those that do show it being in-stock are marking up the price as much as double the list).

DPReview recently posted their extensive review of all the camera’s functions and features. So if you’re looking for a feature run down, check that out (if you haven’t already). These are my first impressions after playing with it this week.

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