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.