A day at the show with Canon EOS R5 and RF 50mm nifty fifty 17 April 2023

 

The annual Royal Easter Show  is an iconic Sydney event which brings the country to the city for two weeks of hectic events both serious and trivial. This post-covid year saw huge crowds flocking to Sydney Olympic park for the great occasion.

This year I elected to photograph the action with my favourite compact street/documentary camera kit, the Canon EOS R5 with RF 50mm f1.8 nifty fifty mounted for the duration. This kit is very compact yet delivers very high picture quality indoors or outdoors.  For many of the photos I held the camera over my head, viewing the scene on the flipped-out monitor screen.

My strategy is to make a sequence of frames at each location and pick the best later. On this day I made 1350 frames in three hours of which I kept 50. Some people dismiss this approach as “spray and pray”.   Others like to put a more assertive spin on the process by calling it ”run and gun”.

I think neither of these phrases does justice to the true nature of the photographic endeavour.

At each photo station I have a fairly clear idea about what little story I am trying to tell. Sometimes this gets modified on the run as events unfold before the camera and that is all part of the fun.

Here are some pix from the day.