On a lovely Sunday I took my camera out for a festival in Chinatown of Vancouver. I arrived at the cross streets listed on the TD (main sponsor) and the Vancouver tourism website and no festival was to be found!
I took a detour to Gastown in Vancouver and it is beautiful! Lots of greenery and potted plants hanging from lamp posts to make a great backdrop. I had the problem of not having a subject to place in front of that backdrop! Oh well.... I guess you don't always feel the need to photograph everything around you. This time I took it in for myself and treated myself to an americano.
I should also say one street performer was playing Last Kiss which I had to throw some money at and another was rocking out to John Melloncamp and I had to tip him also. He was rocking so much I was compelled to grab his photo!
I called the day a little early and jumped the subway home to Yaletown. As I exited the Yaletown-Roundhouse station I could hear interesting music and a small crowd gathered under a sky of hanging, colored umbrellas. I had to check it out.
As it turns out I found La Milonguita de Yaletown which is hosted by the wonderful Céline. I believe it is attended by the Tango Vancouver Facebook group but it is open to the public for watching and participation. I caught the second occurrence of this even on August 12th and since then I have found out there is a third happening on September 9th, 2018. If you are interested you should check it out! Céline noticed I was hanging around with my camera shooting photos and asked if it would be possible for her to grab a copy. Yes! Of course! was the obvious reply for me. I stayed a little longer trying a few settings on my camera.
Here are a few links. One for the Tango Vancouver and one to the event page I attended.
I explored some auto-focus settings on my Nikon D5100 with dynamic auto-focus and 3d tracking auto-focus. My end opinion is these auto-focus settings on my D5100 are garbage. Many many missed focus when it should be simple slow movement captures. I easily could have made a mistake. I have much more success when I can use single point auto-focus. Sometimes the regular auto-focus setting can be good. End result is a lot of photos and about 70% not usable.
Another great learning experience which also drove home my desire for a new camera body. Luckily not all were missed shots! Some were nice. I think I will shoot with a closer zoom in the future if I was to do it again. On this shoot I tried often to get the overhead balloons in which had me backed up from the dancers. A solution purely for the look and not for the participants would be to move the dancers much closer to me which would change the perspective making dancers appear larger and "look" like the are dancing under the umbrellas however they would be close to me with the umbrellas in the background.
So without further delay, please enjoy these Tango moments from La Milonguita de Yaletown!
~The RPG
