Alaaf! Photographing carnaval. Kind of ...
Retro//Reflection - Issue #27
Once or twice per month I send out a letter with a handful of (my) photographs and share a bit of insight on the ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. As an enthusiastic photographer, anything goes.
Maybe you’ll learn something?
Or perhaps it will spark some inspiration?
If you would have visited the south of The Netherlands last week1, you’d probably have seen a lot of people dressed up funny, singing, drinking and shouting “Alaaf!” a lot. Well, that’s because last week it was our traditional carnaval. There’s a whole lot to tell about its catholic origins, Prince (or Princess) Carnaval, the number eleven and parades around vastelaovend (which roughly translated as the eve of the fasting), but this post will stick to its main purpose, that is: showing some photographs.
Now, I’m not a carnavalist by any means, but I don’t mind watching a parade. There are many to choose from; basically every village, town or city has one. Some modest (half an hour and you’ve seen everyone pass by), some will keep you watching all afternoon with lots of groups and parade floats.
It’s always fun to see what people come up with. Always cheeky, poking fun at authorities, (local) politics or events of the past year. But all with a good sense of humor and plenty of self-mockery.
This year we visited two parades: the one in the town I live in and one in a nearby village. Recently I got myself last-years Google Pixel 8 Pro smartphone, and thought I’d use the opportunity to snap a few photos along the way. Nothing complicated, everything on auto mode, just to see what is does out of the box.
Above from left to right: The Masked Singer is a TV show (probably also in your country?), but this guy had an antique Singer sewing machine with a mask in front. Thought I keep his face hidden behind the sign as well! In the center someone with a sign saying “Walks down memory lane” (with a lot of pictures of local people celebrating carnaval on the other side) and on the right two “Reporters”. The sign on his back roughly translates as that in Sjweikese2, real stories can be found in the streets.
Above left: a holder for a beer bottle is pretty much mandatory. Right: this guy was actually BBQ-ing sausages while standing on a cart: they called him the Prince Of Grill 😂
If you have been following my channel for a … oh wait, that’s youtubers. Er … so if you have been reading my publication for a while, you might have noticed that I don’t really (like to) photograph people. Now, one thing with photographing carnaval is that it’s pretty much impossible to not have any people (drunk or otherwise) in your photo’s. But, I like a challenge, so in the last couple of weeks I also tried to capture photos that show something that was carnaval related but does not include people: this turned out to be mostly the red-yellow-and-green flags!
But hey, what about that Pixel 8 Pro?
To round up this post some initial thoughts about the Pixel 8 Pro’s camera feature. I don’t want to do a gear review but what I can say is that I’m not going to ditch my Fuji X system anytime soon. Sure, the cameras produce okay enough photos given that it’s *just a smartphone*. It has 48 and 50 MP sensors, but uses pixel-binning software wizardry so you’ll end up with around 12,5 MP files, which look great on the screen of the phone but when looking at them on my normal computer monitor, I can clearly see the difference with my Fuji files (I know, I know, I should not pixel-peep).
That said, I do like that the phone has an optical telephoto lens, something that I’ve always missed on smartphone cameras and, because of that pixel-binning-thing, there are some in between focal lengths possible. So in practice the wide angle is around 24mm equivalent and you can ‘zoom’ up to 3x or switch to the telephoto (113mm equivalent). You all end up with the same 12.5MP files JPEG (and RAW files).
So far I don’t really enjoy using the Google Camera app. You do have “manual” controls, but I do find myself swiping left and right far too much to get to where I need to be. And there’s no black & white / monochrome option. Now I (still) have to use Lightroom Mobile for that, but that one can’t access the telephoto lens. 🤦♂️C’mon people!
I’m also not convinced I will be using the RAW files to get more out of the photos in post; maybe if I select the 50MP option and get the actual sensor output files? But we’ll see, there’s more to explore - still early days …
If you want to learn more, here’s a good review (that is not a YouTube video …): https://amateurphotographer.com/review/google-pixel-8-pro-review/
By the way, the photo’s shown here in this post are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs, (slightly) cropped and/or (slightly) edited to taste in Capture One. I typically thought the out of camera JPEGs looked somewhat over-sharpened, so I dialed it down with a bit of negative clarity.
Anyway, carnaval is over and so is this issue of Retroreflection. My final question to you: did you celebrate carnaval? :)
Each issue I want to end with mentioning a photographer, a photography-related website or publication, simply to show my appreciation for what they do.
I use a few (raw) editors to post-process my photo’s, but to manage all (final / published) photos I use a separate tool: digiKam. It’s an open source digital photo manager (which I use it 90% of the time for), but it can also edit images (resizing, color correction, cropping, and retouching). Maybe I’ll write a post someday on how I use this tool in my workflow 🤔
That’s it for this issue. Thank you for reading until the end. Feel free to leave a short comment or message. Appreciate it!
Until next time, cheers,
Ronald
ronaldsmeets.info
ps: this article/letter/post is free, because I’m not doing this to make a profit. Also, I don’t like subscriptions at all. However, if you do want to show your support, a coffee always helps me writing and posting here ;-)
Or Limburg in Belgium, or even places like Aachen or Köln in Germany …
The name of the town, but in Limburg’s dialect :)
That looks like a lot of fun. I used to love parades as a kid but they have lost their luster for me as I got older. Why is that I wonder? Wonderful photos with the Pixel!
Special thanks for the Digikam link, gonna give it a try.