I’ve started working on the photos from my September/October trip to Barcelona and the Mediterranean. The first day we arrived in Barcelona, we could tell something big was about to go on, but we had no idea it was the city’s biggest annual celebration of their patron saint, the Virgin of La Mercè. The Festa De La Mare De Dèu De La Mercè was a week long celebration and we got there right as it was taking off. While walking through the Gothic Quarter, we came across the giant figures that we would see later that evening at the parade. The parade was fast paced and really awesome with the giant figures twirling and swooping down at the crowds. Later in the night, we came across locals doing traditional dances in the streets and courtyards.
Things I would have done different with these images: 1. I would have bumped up the ISO so I could have used faster shutter speeds. For the most part, I am OK with these since the parade was a dynamic event, but there was a bit of camera shake in a number of these that I wish wasn’t there. 2. While I love my 16-35mm wide angle lens, I wish I would have had a medium zoom lens because I wasn’t able to move in closer to the parade floats and participants. I had to rely on post process cropping to “zoom” in. Because the focal point of the uncropped images was different than the area I cropped, the cropped images were not always as sharp as i might have liked. 3. I would not have been in Program Mode!!! I vaguely remember setting the camera to Program Mode because we quite literally stumbled right into this parade and I didn’t have much time to think about it. I thought at the time I would have been better off in Program than missing some shots if in Aperture or Manual modes. I think with a narrower aperture, higher ISO, faster shutter speeds, my images would have been much sharper.