Photos and Parades

Now is the time to take photos of parades. The weather is warm and steamy and all sorts of characters come out to watch parades. In the USA, I find the Fourth of July Parades the most well attended along with those individual parades where towns or cities celebrate their individual identity like the 'Foxborough Founders' Day Parade' or Hometown Days or cultural or religious events like the Boston's North End's St. Anthony's Feast Day Parade.

You can get pics of kids, families, or people OR vendors OR floats OR music bands and groups OR old or new fire engines, trucks, tractors or cars OR clowns OR horses Or different cultural icons like Chinese dragons or religious figures. You get the idea. There is always something to photograph. Just keep shooting. You can always save the images to your computer and come back later to pull them up to use.

My MOST IMPORTANT suggestion is to always keep your original image. Make copies of that original to work with and alter whether it be cropping, changing the exposure or color, or whatever. KEEP the original unaltered.

See the pictures here for how I took one picture of the New Hampshire Governor's Horse Guard (the original is the bottom photo) when they were lining up for a parade and used several portions of the original to come up with even more pictures of interest. I know the photos are not very clear, but this is just to give you the idea.

I remember one time I altered a photo because I thought that I would never want to use it again, then about a year later I was kicking myself for not saving the original; it had a photo of a very dear friend who passed away in the unsaved portion.

Try this technique and you will not regret ruining an original image ever again.