Cars, Chicks (and my clicks)
Lady Luck is back!
For those of you who don’t know, Lady Luck is a local Blue Mountains Festival celebrating the customs and culture of the 1950's. It happens typically around January and is held at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, NSW. Expect vintage cars, dancing, stalls, craft beer… you name it. It’s really a wonderful experience and one of my favorite events to document.
This year I discovered some of my own personal limits. I tried to go out armed with both my Pentax 645D medium format camera and the compact pocketable Ricoh GRIIIx (on loan from Pentax). Adding to this some lights, tripod and modifiers, but in the end I discovered juggling these two different cameras was too taxing for me, in order to produce the goods I needed to concentrate on the 645D, so the GRIIIx remained in my pocket for most of the day :’(
Above, what I took with me for the day.
I often double up the tripod to being a light stand as well thus saving some kit weight by leaving the light stand at home. I wasn’t sure if I would need the tripod for actual shooting but was thankful I brought it with me. All of the car shots this year were located inside and under cover whereas in previous years they closed the main street for the cars, which I felt worked better for environmental context as well as better light to work with. With dim artificial light and an ‘old’ medium format camera with no image stabilization, a maximum ISO of 1600 (and you really ought to keep it 400 or lower)… so yeh.. all the car shots were taken, mirror up and 2 second timer with the tripod.
Cars.
Chicks ‘n Clicks.
A massive pull for the Lady Luck festival is the attraction of the very popular Sydney Swing Katz. These guys and gals are just fantastic to watch, I am always torn between trying to capture them with my camera or just putting the gear down and fully absorbing the show!
With any genre of photography that has a degree of motion (dance, sport, action etc) I like to try and portray that core element of motion or movement. ‘Dragging the shutter’ is what it is typically referred to the technique you see below, but I also provide support with off camera flash (handheld, no easy feet when the other hand is operating a heavy 645 camera one handed!). The strobe freezes some of the frame, so the end result is a mixture of frozen ‘ghost like’ transparency with some clarity in places. I feel it drives this idea of chaos and movement but not ignoring the concept of context and still providing a notion of what is going on.
Of course I also like to do the ‘normal’ shots, moments caught in time are also iconic and classic. What follows are a few shots of some festival participants as well as members of the Sydney Swing Katz on some downtime/practice (before the evenings After Party).
Overall I wasn’t sure how the aging 645D would fair at trying to cover an event like this. I mean its practically a landscape only camera! At a maximum 1.1 fps and a buffer that fills extremely quickly, as well as shutter lag (slight delay in the camera actioning the shot) make for this a very tricky shoot indeed. Still it was a lot of fun and the colours that come from the CCD sensor are a marvel to work with. However, I really should do some monochrome interpretations of this day sometime down the line :)
And that concludes my haul from the afternoons effort. This time I didn’t stay around to cover the After Party, but if you would like to see some older shots from that evenings reception then you can check out my 2020 album here.
As always please feel free to leave a comment and thanks for looking.
