Chinese New Year Parade

Every year there is a Chinese New Year Parade in DC’s China town; sadly, the parade is slowly deteriorating and becoming smaller and smaller. Also people are just not being courteous, they move out into the street in front of the parade marchers and the security isn’t keeping the parade watchers on the sidewalk. It is also becoming more and more difficult, to take pictures politely without having people with their phone and iPads jumping in front of me. So I think this was my last year photographing the Chinese New Year Parade.

I did get a few nice shots of the dragon dancers. I shot at ISO 200 at F10 with a 1/160s shutter. You can see all the parade pictures here.

Comments

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough. I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts. However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer. I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it. Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed. But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy. He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...

Return to the National Portrait Gallery

On February 28th, I attended the Costume & Camera (previously DC Cosplay Photoshoots) event at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. I have a love/hate relationship with shooting at the National Portrait Gallery; it is a beautiful location due to its architecture, especially on the third floor, and I’m thankful that you are allowed to do portrait photography there as long as you don’t use flash. What I get frustrated with is the varying colors of light throughout the building and the need to use natural or continuous light. (I’m a flash girly.) For this event, I used: Canon R6 24 - 105mm lens Neewer 12-inch LED light Assistant Camera Settings: This shoot was inside the Portrait Gallery, which has a no flash policy, thus I was using a mix of natural and continuous lighting, which affects settings. My ISO ranged from 100 ISO to 3200 ISO with the most common ISO being ISO 1000. My aperture stayed between F4 and F5, with the most c...

Cyber Blue

On October 11 th , I worked with Dayvon on a cyber concept shoot. This shoot was designed around a pair of contact lens with a circuit board pattern. This inspired me to think about things like “Blade Runner”, “Tron” and cyber punk in general. For this shoot I used: Canon 80D 2 Speed lights 2 Phottix strobes 2 Phottix Rectangular Softboxes with a grid 2 C-stands Blue gels Silver garage insulation Backdrop stand Black backdrop Connectable foam workout mats For this shoot I started out using four lights. The first two were small speed lights with blue gels attached placed on the floor aimed at the backdrop. The backdrop was silver garage insulation, which looks like silver bubble wrap. The backdrop reflected the blue light forward providing a bit of rim light. My main two lights were the strobes is rectangular soft boxes with grids attached. For this shoot I kept the lighting very low key, styled along that of a photo of Ryan Gosling i...

The Munchkin's Notebook

Search This Blog