Big clouds over the Big Fresno Fair

I had quite the busy day on the first day of this year’s Big Fresno Fair.

My plan was to help out at the Fresno Bee booth with my Fresno Photo Booth. We got set up but then the skies opened up with a huge downpour. Luckily, I have a canopy to keep the booth dry. I was really worried nobody was going to come because it was so wet. But in another stroke of luck, the raindrops stopped by the time the fair started.

In the end we had quite a few kids, families and individuals come up to take a photo booth picture which we posted on the Bee’s new Snap photo gallery. I also shot a few candids, including moments from the Fresno Beehive’s facial hair contest which were added to Snap.

Toward the end of the day, I got a call from my photo editor that we need to get a dusk-time photo showing the mid-way at the fair to tell the story of the unpredictable weather situation on the first day. Great. Problem was, it was already 6:15pm and I hadn’t put away the photo booth yet. I had probably less than an hour before the sun would set and there would be no light left in the sky to make a picture. I had to hustle to break down the booth and make three trips out to my car which was parked about three blocks away. It was a cool day, but I tell ya, I was sweatin’!

So finally after everything was packed away I ran out to the mid-way with my two Canon 5Ds. I was excited that there was still a tiny bit of light left in the sky and the clouds looked really cool. Ideally, I would have used a tripod to get some motion in the rides, but I didn’t have mine with me. So instead, I just hand-held the camera at about 1/20th of a second. I set the iso and aperture to get some brightness in the sky without blowing out the lights in the rides. In the end it worked out really well and I got a lot of feedback on the Bee Photography Facebook site. All-in-all a pretty productive day. Whew!