Shooting a Fair

[Alowisney]

How would you go about shooting a fair? I'm going to be shooting one as part of a photo walk and I've got some ideas on how I want to do it. Please share how you'd do it!

I thought about starting the day shooting in High Contrast B&W but I figured I should keep it in color and just do the black and white in post processing. After it gets to twilight and darkness though, I plan on using pop color and toy camera quite a bit to get all the neon of the midway. Is that a good idea though? Would it be better to just shoot as normal and then edit for effect? What do you think?

 

[Tymoe]

In general it's better to shoot in normal mode, yes! Especially shooting special situations. Imagine coming home and realizing that all pictures look crappy (for example too dark, too much effect, etc.).
Another argument against toycam or other -modes is, that you do not have as much control as you have in normal shooting-modes; the toycam-program somehow behaves like the full-automatic-mode; I think you cannot even manually influence the ISO value.
A fair can have tricky situations concerning the lighting, so you have to be able to adapt your adjustments.


/e: look at travisennis' little collection of fair-shots... https://www.talkemount.com/f18/going-fair-490/ As you can see, he had to manage absolutely different settings

 

[Travisennis]

I never use any of the scene modes because while I many times like the end result, I lose the ability to change my mind later on about how I want the image to look. I only shoot in aperture or shutter priority or in manual mode. I used to shoot both RAW and jpeg, but I only shoot RAW now. I have to spend more time in the end doing post-processing, but the flexibility it affords me is worth it. Flexibility is invaluable when shooting something like a fair with changing natural light conditions and a mixture of artificial lights.