How to Design Your Photo for Mardi Gras
Mardi Gras is one of the world's best-known parties. Culminating in Fat Tuesday, the last day before the beginning of Lent, Mardi Gras is a celebration of music, parades, fashion, food, drinking and debauchery. The biggest Mardi Gras celebration in the United States is in New Orleans; many other cities celebrate it under the name Carnivale. Photography is a fun way of visually documenting the experience, and the explosion of sights and colors associated with the event has a lot of photographic potential.
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Instructions
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Incorporate the novel sights and bright colors of Mardi Gras into your pictures. The event features parades, street parties, and people adorned in vivid colors and clothing -- all of which are interesting to photograph. Do you want to capture the fanciful costumes? Parade floats? Street musicians? Or do you prefer to photograph yourself and your friends? Mardi Gras offers a range of subject matter.
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Design photos with the "rule of thirds" when composing your shot. This is a technique that divides the visual field into three equal parts. Frame your shot accordingly; for example, a trumpet-player in the far-left third -- offset by a dancing crowd in the two other thirds -- would make a well-balanced shot.
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Focus your camera sharply to capture everything in the visual field, or design your photo with "soft focus," where the foreground is sharp, but the background is slightly blurred. This is a good technique to use with Mardi Gras portrait shots of your friends or others. For example, take a soft focus picture of your friends in costume, so that your friends are sharply focused and the background is blurry. Or find a street musician in front of a parade. Set the focus so the musician is clear, and the parade is slightly blurred -- but still visible.
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Photograph examples of contrast. Contrast is a photographic technique whereby differing colors or subjects are juxtaposed, creating appealing visual tension in the photo. In an event like Mardi Gras, where so many different things are happening at once, you should be able to find examples of contrast. Look for contrasting color combinations; for example, one party-goer clad in gold and green and another all in purple. Or keep an eye out for contrasting subject matter; for example, a laughing little girl standing next to an old man in costume.
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References
- Photo Credit Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images
