It’s Fiestas time in Santa Fe, one of the highlights of which is the Desfile de los Ninos, also known as the Pet Parade. Originally an occasion for children to bring their pets to be blessed by the priest, it’s broadened into a relaxed and funky parade including high school bands in fancy dress, chickens in cages, some amazing costumes and still a large number of children and pets (including this year chickens, rabbits, cockatoos, ferrets, cats and lots of dogs).
Shooting a parade like this sounds as if it would be easy with all the great spectacles on offer, but it can actually be tricky. The first problem is that you can’t move around too much – I had my spot on the side of the parade route and that was about it. So choose wisely and watch the direction of the sun – I was almost shooting straight into it today, which wasn’t ideal (but I was right outside the door to our office, so at least I had hot coffee).
Another problem is that there’s likely to be a lot of visual clutter. Your naked eye filters out the messy background when you see a cute dog dressed up like a cowboy, but the camera will also show the random feet and the white line on the street that your eye glossed over. The other people in the parade (and the other people watching it from across the street) make it hard to get clean shots (especially if you can’t move around to edit them out). You can shoot wide open (in other words with a lowest number aperture your lens can deliver) to create a narrow depth of field, blurring the background, but this brings up another problem – lens choice:
Sometimes you want an wide-ish establishing shot – to show a whole group of folks as they approach, for example. Other times, it’s the little details that stand out. This mixture is a good approach, but that calls for a range of maybe 28mm – 200mm or more on a full frame camera (around 18mm – 130mm on a crop sensor). That’s a big ask of any single lens especially if you want some good sharpness wide open.
In other years I’ve swapped between my 24-105mm f/4L and 70-200mm f/4L on one body, but that’s a bit of a pain, so this year I cheated and used two camera bodies, putting the 70-200mm on my old backup Rebel XT and keeping the 24-105mm on my 5D. The downside was that I looked like a newspaper shooter, but the upside was that I had the equivalent of a full-frame range of 24-320mm at my disposal.
I wasn’t trying hard to capture decent shots of every group that passed, just photograph the things that grabbed me the most.
Here’s a selection from this year’s parade, with a few from earlier years thrown in for good measure.
