Holi Thoughts

 © 2012, Peter Marshall

Photographing the Hindu festival of Holi, at which people throw coloured powder at each other brought back several memories. My first full-time job back in the 1960s was as a chemist for a company making dyestuffs, and walking through parts of the factory I would often see men covered in the products, perhaps from emptying barrels of dye into a packing machine. Most of the labourers at that time were from India, mainly Sikhs, and the part of the site which was my lab is now occupied by a Gurdwara.

I don’t think that some of those dyes would have washed off easily, but unlike the paint I got covered with last year during a black bloc protest, most of the colour from Holi washed off more or less immediately, though I did attract quite a bit of attention on my way home from the festival as although I’d removed some of it there was still a noticeable amount on my face and hair.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

It isn’t the kind of thing you can photograph without taking part in, getting close to people. Although I didn’t want to get entirely covered with colour I really felt a little out of things until I had some thrown at me. Then one of the younger participants clearly wanted to smear more blue over me, though I had too move just a little closer still so he could reach.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

As you can see from the trees in the background, I’ve processed these images normally and haven’t increased the contrast or saturation. Most of them were taken with the 16-35mm on the D700, and in situations like this I usually find it better to use the ‘Auto-Area AF Mode’ where the camera decides what to focus on. It’s supposed to be able to pick out people from the background and focus on them, and it seems usually to have got it right despite the odd colours.  This mode also seems to work better with flash (which I also used on most pictures) whereas with single point AF and continuous servo AF there is often quite a delay before the camera is happy enough with focus for the flash to fire.

Back in the old days, working with cameras without autofocus, I would simply have set the lens to a suitable distance, perhaps 1.5 meters, stopped down perhaps to f8 and let depth of field cover things. It would probably still have been a better solution, but the camera did quite well.

© 2012, Peter Marshall

Of course the hardest thing is always being in the right place and making the exposure at the right time, especially when things are moving fast. I took quite a few exposures of the two women in this picture before I managed to catch what I wanted. It might had been a little easier if I had chosen to work with the camera on a continuous exposure setting – either of 3 or 5 fps, but that would have generated huge numbers of exposures, and I was taking far too many working in single exposure mode.

You can see quite a few of those in Holi Festival, Twickenham on My London Diary. I had really only gone for the throwing of colour and the pictures don’t really do justice to the other aspects of the festival.

________________________________________________________

My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated are by Peter Marshall and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.