Chinese New Year Parade
Most of the pictures came out very badly because the "night" setting on the camera deals with darkness solely by taking a very long exposure. Which meant that of two hundred pictures I threw away all but sixty or so, and most of those sixty are not so much documentary photos as artsy impressionistic abstracts that I think I might like well enough.
I have noticed that there is a way to do truly manual settings, but they're not labelled in ways that mean anything to me (the old-fashioned regular f-stop numbers etc. are there, but navigation and setting are completely mysterious), so I haven't mastered that yet.
However, one of the Immortals stayed still long enough that I could catch a decent picture of her. She was bowing to the crowd.
Every year there are big head puppets of the Eight Immortals. We always get really excited when they come. Also there are big head puppets of these demony guys who walk with the shrine of the Matsu Temple. I guess they must be her bodyguards or something. And there are children big head puppets of various laughing-buddha things.
This year is the year of the pig, so there were "three little pigs and the big bad wolf;" a whole elementary school of flying pigs: and a kung fu school of Pigsys with sand rakes (the nice fellow said, actually, Sandy ought to have the rake and Pigsy ought to have a spade, but we weren't going to argue with kung fu students with wooden rakes!) And of course there were the obligatory children carrying zodiac animals made of various materials, as well as costumes from earlier years ( I saw horse, dog -- last year, very cute, the kindergarteners were tumbling around to "Who Let the Dogs Out?") and of course Monkey himself. I have never seen the TV series, unless it's the same as an episode I saw at the DeYoung museum years ago.
Unfortunately, the St. Mary's School Drum and Bell Corps photo is one of the more impressionistic ones. Maybe you could say that it's a statement about the ephemeral nature of childhood, beauty, and life itself. Or I could just cop to the fact that I did not have control of my camera last night.
I have noticed that there is a way to do truly manual settings, but they're not labelled in ways that mean anything to me (the old-fashioned regular f-stop numbers etc. are there, but navigation and setting are completely mysterious), so I haven't mastered that yet.
However, one of the Immortals stayed still long enough that I could catch a decent picture of her. She was bowing to the crowd.
Every year there are big head puppets of the Eight Immortals. We always get really excited when they come. Also there are big head puppets of these demony guys who walk with the shrine of the Matsu Temple. I guess they must be her bodyguards or something. And there are children big head puppets of various laughing-buddha things.
This year is the year of the pig, so there were "three little pigs and the big bad wolf;" a whole elementary school of flying pigs: and a kung fu school of Pigsys with sand rakes (the nice fellow said, actually, Sandy ought to have the rake and Pigsy ought to have a spade, but we weren't going to argue with kung fu students with wooden rakes!) And of course there were the obligatory children carrying zodiac animals made of various materials, as well as costumes from earlier years ( I saw horse, dog -- last year, very cute, the kindergarteners were tumbling around to "Who Let the Dogs Out?") and of course Monkey himself. I have never seen the TV series, unless it's the same as an episode I saw at the DeYoung museum years ago.
Unfortunately, the St. Mary's School Drum and Bell Corps photo is one of the more impressionistic ones. Maybe you could say that it's a statement about the ephemeral nature of childhood, beauty, and life itself. Or I could just cop to the fact that I did not have control of my camera last night.