Great Dickens Christmas Fair (many pics)

San Francisco, last Sunday. I so like these events when people dress like in Victorian times, because they also behave like our ancestors, noble and nice. It's unforgettable atmosphere, it feels like in time machine.

I was there with E-PL5 and 3 primes, Pana 25mm, Oly 45 and 75mm. The light was too dark, in many places camera measured ISO 12800 at F1.8 and 1/100s shutter. Sometimes a bit brighter but the available light was so inconsistent that I had to use flash (FL-36R). Good thing is that the flash didn't bother people, most people liked being photographed. Another good thing is that E-PL5 had no trouble focusing in such low light.

Here are some pictures, C&C are welcome and Merry Christmas:)

The place was sometimes crowded, not easy to find a model:


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There were dancers

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and shows:

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but mostly people were just enjoying a good time



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There are many more photos, I chose 159 from that day. If you like these you can see them all here: https://picasaweb.google.com/mchestakov/GreatDickensChristmasFair2012

I'm so glad that such events exist. There was a similar event, Northern California Renaissance Faire that I captured in September, mostly with OM-D and Oly 75m:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/post/50018934
https://picasaweb.google.com/mchestakov/NorthernCaliforniaRenaissanceFaire2012

Lovely collection of images , though the lady on the phone in the first image doesn't look too happy at having her photo taken

cheers

Jim

Weather was dull in San Francisco



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Well done: Love my EPL5; you made it shine !

Thanks, Vjim

jim stirling wrote:

Lovely collection of images , though the lady on the phone in the first image doesn't look too happy at having her photo taken

Might be, but she was much happier later, it's also her at the left.



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I understand that Dark Garden is a company that makes corsets. They had two booths at the fair with models displaying them. This was a photographer's paradise. Well, a paradise for a hobbyist photographer who doesn't have models or studio setup. Models were staying still, an ideal exercise to try making a perfect portrait composition. Very popular place, many people photographed them.

This is how it looked:


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These two below are blurred because I was in rush to capture the boy looking at the model. There was another photographer who occupied the best possible place to take this photo. A guy with large Canon DSLR, something like macro ring flash and another flash in hotshoe with large softbox. I was trying to quickly choose second best spot close to him without interfering and blurred the pictures. I hope he got better ones.



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And then, closer to the end of the event, there was that nice lady posing. A small group of young people (around 18-20 year old) were standing close to the booth singing songs, starring at her, making grimaces, trying to make her laugh or at least attract her attention. I'm sure the lady wanted to laugh, she looked at them, but she was holding well. I had 75mm lens mounted, I couldn't capture the group, didn't change to Pana 25mm deciding to capture lady's emotions:



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1:1 crop

If I posted the picture above without comments some might probably consider it a decent potrait. It's 0.8 megapixel resolution, many people post pictures of that size, resized for web.
What makes this picture outstanding is that it's actually a crop of larger image (which itself is a crop due to my suboptimal framing):

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And I can't resist from posting this crop to illustrate the amount of detail this lens resolves:



1:1 crop, 75mm



full frame

According to Roger Cicala from RensRental Oly 75mm resolves 880 Line Pairs/Image Height in center at F1.8, and at F2.8 it resolves 1020 lp/ih.
By the same measurement Panasonic 35-100mm at 100mm and F2.8 resolves only about 630 lp/ih.

Even if we consider Oly's resolution to be 900 lp/ih at F2.0 (it's probably better), cropping and magnifying Oly 75mm image gives resolution better than Pana zoom would have cropped to 107mm FL FOV. And I would have to raise ISO one stop more for F2.8 aperture. IMO, for low light telephoto reach Oly 75mm is a clear winner, a great lens to capture shows from far away.



From behind the crowd, camera handheld as high up as I could

gollywop wrote:

WB much better with these shots.

Regarding WB. These are mostly taken with AutoWB without any WB adjustments.
I shoot raw and I do brightness/contrast adjustments in LR as well as noise reduction. I had to do it because all indoor pics were purposedly undereposed at ISO 800 to allow lower flash intensity.

But white balance is something that I rarely had to change - Olympus is so good at AutoWB. I probably adjusted WB for 10% or so of the pictures. You may find AutoWB questionable sometimes but that's only because the light was so horrible and inconsistent. The available light mostly had yellowish and purplish cast. Flash added to the mix and its intensity varied because of TTL. I did try different WB for some pics and it was hard to do better than AutoWB did.
If I had to change WB for every photo it would increase PP time a lot.

I'm not exaggerating about horrible light - you can see what the light looked like here, at the official event site: http://www.dickensfair.com/galleries

On a side note about AutoWB. We had a holiday group lunch at our company this week. It was in a dark restaurant with yellow artificial lighting. Me and my colleague were shooting pics, without flash, both at ISO 3200. He was using Sony NEX-5R and I had E-PL5. While his camera was a bit better at ISO 3200 all his pictures showed yellow people's faces. My pictures gave just right people's skin colors given that light, without any adjustment.

AutoWB is something that I appreciate a lot in Olympus cameras since I got into m4/3 last year.