Assignment 2: Getting to the End

It's Thursday and pouring outside, so only 3 days left now in the 2012 Oktoberfest.  I think I am in a good place, I have images already that work with my theme and neatly illustrate the Oktoberfest.  Tomorrow and Saturday I have invites to attend and so the amount of further photography I am likely to do will be limited, although I do plan to really take advantage of tomorrow.  One of the missing elements thus far in what I have completed is imagery from inside the tents.

The tents present a photographic challenge simply due to the chaos of the crowds, it is hard to single out a group of people without others obscuring the tableaux that I want to capture.  Light is not really a problem, the tents canvas roof is transparent and provides a nice soft flat illumination.  Here are a few sample images starting with the best one, a possible inclusion.

Another way is to photograph people in the beer gardens outside, but the light is usually too harsh, else it is raining.

I continue to find plenty of people the worse for wear:

And yesterday managed to find a bit of confrontation

A lot of the images in this post were taken using a 70-200mm zoom telephoto, but not the last one, that used a 35mm equivalent lens meaning I was in close.  This really was a snatched shot as the situation was messy and the security guards not too happy being photographed.  After two frames I moved on quickly.  This is, however, a good example of the darker side of the fest, very drunk people occasionally get into fights.  It is much rarer than you might be expected and having seen how efficiently and aggressively the security guards deal with it, that should not be a surprise.

Turning to a brighter topic, in my last post I mentioned that I was planning to build this out into a book and was going to shoot some "icons" of the fest to use within the framework.  This is a selection of what I got, again using the 70-200 to enable me to fill the frame with the objects:

I was looking for colour and symbology and I think I found it.

Well, nearly there, in a few days it'll be down to the edit and thinking about how to string the narrative together.