Community Christmas

Among other things, Christmas is a time where a sense of community is most strongly felt in a small town or city. This is normally reinforced by a large variety of events taking place throughout the festive period. I’ve tried to visit quite a few as they always provide great photo opportunities. I took this photo at one of the events I attended.

This particular event attempted to showcase the large diversity of culture that we have in our local area; exhibiting this through traditional cooking on the part of each culture involved. One of the stands that I saw as I walked around was Spanish. I liked how they had a long row of pans at the front, advertising their food. It was intriguing to watch them cooking, as much as it was trying. I decided to try to capture a sense of the rush in my photo. I used an aperture of F11 to encourage a larger depth of field. I had to use a slower shutter speed to accommodate this, so some of the people are blurred through movement, but I think this adds to the effect.

Because light was shining through a coloured gazebo, the photo was hard to edit and a few colours came out looking a little odd. I edited the picture in Photoshop to try to dampen some of the effects. I changed the hue, increased the contrast and sharpened the image to bring up finer details. Considering I was being pushed in a busy crowd and only had one chance to take this picture, I think it turned out well.

Bex

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