One of the annual events in my little south Swedish hometown is the Bonnamarknaden (literally meaning Farmers’ Market, although there’s not much related to farmers these days). I don’t go down there every year, since it tends to be more or less the same thing every year, but I figured I’d have a go at it this year, since I’ve not done much street photography lately. I can always do with some practice, to keep my observational skills honed and ready!
The event, put on by a local Lion’s Club chapter for charity, blocks off large parts of the town center from Thursday afternoon to Sunday evening and when I was there in the middle of the Saturday afternoon our main street was pretty packed with visitors looking through the stalls, munching on intensely unhealthy market foods or going to the traveling carnival rides put up in a local park adjacent to Main Street.
The weather was unusually cold and unforgiving this year so I didn’t stay as long as I originally had plans on in order to get more photos taken, but I am glad I got as many keepers as I did in the end…even with my rather aggressive culling “philosophy” that I’ve adopted lately. I came home with about 75 images on the memory card from about an hour’s worth of shooting and ended up keeping 15, of which I’ll show most in this post. All in all a nice, but short, outing in the neighborhood!
I still wonder why people take their dogs to these crowded, often loud and stress-inducing places!
This was literally a “shot from the hip”…they walked past me so suddenly I only had time to raise the camera to hip level.
For the images below (and the title image) I shot of the carnival rides I decided to try my Fujifilm XT-3’s fast shutter speed capabilities. I put the camera on a 1/1000 of a second and the rapid fire burst mode and ended up with a few keepers that I was happy with (once I’d done some correction of light and color levels). It definitely helped to shoot in RAW because that retains a lot more information than the already processed JPG images. Only snag is the file size is bigger, but hard drives are pretty cheap these days! :-)
This one is almost too sharp…you can’t even tell that these three are moving really fast towards me.
It’s cool to see the details the camera captured that I didn’t see, because the girls were more or less a blur moving past me!
Sadly the weight limit was 40 kilos (about 80 lbs) so I was not able to test this attraction…