The Jember Fashion Carnival in Indonesia spans the gamut from stunningly beautiful and incredibly creative to ultra bizarre. It's a remarkable visual and photographic experience. All festivals, though, are tough in many ways because you have to think very fast and react just as fast to grab prime moments in the action. Plus, you have no control over the backgrounds, the lighting, and the juxtaposition of the participants. In order to optimize your effort, Photoshop is necessary to take the raw material and turn it into something worthy of art. Almost every background behind the carnival participants in Jember was less than ideal. Shooting down the street where the procession began, for example, showed an unattractive bank building behind the beautiful costumes. So, in this instance I replaced the background with a shot of the ancient Hindu ruins on Java, Prambanan, that I had photographed a few years earlier. Making a selection in this shot was time consuming, especially using the trackpad on my laptop, but the composite is a lot more attractive than the original. My settings for the costumed group were 1/320, f/16, and 1000 ISO. I used a small aperture because the 500mm focal length I was shooting with has shallow depth of field, and I wanted all of the people sharp.
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