Manchester Pride 2014

This weekend was my home city's LGBT Pride festival which I consider to be Manchester's best photo-op, not to mention a ton of fun. The festival itself takes the entirety of the August bank holiday weekend but I typically just attend the parade, which takes place on the afternoon of the Saturday. Normally I haul myself up to one of the deep window ledges that abound in the former warehouse district of the city where the parade finishes up (and I happen to live, by the gay village) but this does mean that I get the same kind of photos year-on-year so this year, since I was accompanied by a friend, I thought I'd switch it up and try and get closer in. It definitely netted some benefits and even my notoriously bad 28-300mm lens delivered some decently sharp shots. A selection are shown below but, as always, the full compliment can be found on my Flickr account.

Manchester Pride Parade 2013

It was my home city of Manchester’s annual gay Pride parade on Saturday, one of the largest and longest-running of such parade’s in the country thanks to our sizeable LGBT community centred around the gay village of Canal Street and the surrounds. It's a great event and all of 100 metres from my home and it’s probably the best photo-op that the city has to offer so I did my usual thing of clambering up to one of the deep window ledges of the former warehouse buildings that dominate the area and snapped over the crowd as the parade went past. It’s been a decent tactic in previous years and resulted in a number of my more successful (according to recorded views) photos but it does mean that I essentially get the same shots year on year. I think next year I’ll aim to get to the front of the crowd and use my 50mm prime instead. Push myself to try different approaches.

The parade was good, if perhaps not quite as good as I've seen it in previous years. In 2010, they had Sir Ian McKellen and in 2011 they had a tank. That sets the bar pretty high. Still, some great costumes and the usual wonderful atmosphere.

The other observation is that my new 28-300mm lens really ain’t all that sharp. Now I knew it wouldn’t be given the range but I was expecting it to be sharper when compared with the lens it replaced (Tamron 18-250) and the price difference between them (the Nikkor being something like 4x the price), I was really expecting more. Nonetheless, I got some decent shots. Here’s a sample:

As always, the full set are available on my Flickr account.

Manchester Pride 2012

A week late in the update but it was the annual gay Pride parade in my home city of Manchester last weekend and, given that I live only about 100 metres from the gay village where the parade winds up, it's a great photo op.

I headed over a little before it was due to start to try and get a good spot to shoot from. I was damn lucky, managing to haul myself up onto the window ledge of a local business and shoot over the crowd. The downside being that the crowd filled in underneath me so I couldn't get down and was trapped on said window ledge for 90 minutes. I did manage to get some good photos, though so it was worth doing. Definitely going to try and secure the same spot next year. It was bit of a challenging shoot, though- the direction of the Sun frequently meant that the parade itself was in shadow and the crowd behind was in direct sunlight meaning it's tricky to get a balance in the final shot- up the exposure to make the subject clear at the risk of creating a distracting blaze of overexposure in the crowd behind? I'm pleased with a number of photos nonetheless.



The complete set of photos from the day can be found here.

Manchester Pride parade

It was the Pride festival in town over the bank holiday weekend. I only live a couple of hundred metres from the gay village so it would have pretty negligent not to stroll out and take a look. Also my climbing skills let me scramble up the side of a building a bit to shoot over the crowd. The only downside is that my Tamron lens is really soft when shooting at the full 250mm (should have stepped down the aperture) but some of the shots look ok at this resolution.

You can check out the other photos I took at Pride here.