At my first newspaper gig in Oklahoma (back in the 1980s), I learned to take a lot of photos at busy events. Photographing active children is a game of percentages. You might take a half dozen or more images of one trick-or-treater to get the shot you want, or maybe none of the images “work” and the moment is gone. So you take a lot of pictures.
I had just finished taking photos of a young warrior when I noticed “Cleopatra” (my guess from her costume) walking by. I grabbed several photos hoping to get one great image. I snapped the shutter the first time at 5:55:56 and the last time at 5:56:24 and she disappeared in the crowd. The total elapsed time for these 10 photos was 28 seconds. The last five frames with her looking my way were all taken in just 2 seconds.
“Cleopatra”
She was moving, so not all of these photos were totally sharp. Sometimes she was not looking my way, which is not necessarily a deal breaker. In some of them I did not like the background. As it turned out, the best and sharpest photo was the last frame and I love the look she is giving me. Unfortunately, a boy’s scabbard (for his sword) was in the frame, so I had to crop this image more tightly than I would have preferred to leave out the scabbard.
My second choice would have been file 3672 (3rd row, last photo) which has a slight amount of motion blur or it would have been my first choice
.
I was shooting in both sun and shade and things were happening too quickly to set a custom white balance. She was in the shade so this image was too blue in tone. When I optimized the image I lightened the exposure and adjusted the white balance to have warmer light on her face.
This was an easy choice for my final cut of 24 images.
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