Chinese New Year 2008

24Mar2008 [photography]

I went out shooting back on 10February2008 (Chinese New Year 2008). The annual Chinese New Year parade winds its way down George St and through Chinatown to Darling Harbour. The parade itself is rather uneventful, but the amount of colour in the streets made for some interesting photo opportunities.

Walking down toward Chinatown I came across numerous groups in the streets off George St — waiting for the parade to start, at which point they'd be fed onto the strip in front of Town Hall. The better photos came from these groups. Once the parade got going I found a spot near the end and snapped everything going past. It was a lot harder than I expected — I deliberately shot with a very narrow depth-of-field, so a large fraction of what I shot just didn't work. But the ones that worked out look really good, so totally worth it.

(Check the rest in the album — Chinese New Year 2008)

I originally put off processing these pics because I was waiting to get my hands on Aperture 2. I managed that much before tripping to Melbourne, where I've just increased the size of the queue of photos waiting to be processed. Working with Aperture 2 is great though — the upgrade is worth it for the speed improvements alone — the initial pass through a shoot used to be difficult, but when I did this set tonight I was able to spend most of my time actually processing the better images, rather than wasting my time weeding out the bad ones. Given that, I'll be getting Melbourne pics online soon, and after that I want to see about using the metadata features of Aperture — I'd not used the program as a library before because it was just too cumbersome.