Color Me Rad!!!!

So todays post isn't necessarily a how to, this past weekend Color Me Rad happened. For those of you who don't know what Color Me Rad is it is a 5k run that has color stations that throw colored cornstarch at you. So essentially you end up a colored mess and it is awesome.

But this is a perfect time to cover outdoor event photography specifically without flash. One thing you want to remember is that the sun creates shadows, and the shadows are hard to illuminate without flash. The upside is that you can use a much faster shutter than if you were using studio lights.

For some closer up shots you can definitely use flash to help like I did in this shot. But when you get to the group shots or wider shotes it is hard to use a flash strong enough to cover everything.

Things like this shot where you have more people in the front and the background. For this image specifically I had my camera set at 125 ISO since the sun was bright in the sky with no clouds at all in front of it, my shutter at 1/250, and my f-stop at 13 yet again it was really bright. It took me a while to get to this point where you can see their faces and the sky isn't totally blown out. it really is a trial and error thing because some days the sun really is brighter than others. this is where my camera stayed most of the time. The one thing that did change more often was my f-stop because being outside the sunlight does fluctuate so you have to be aware of that. If you aren't aware of that your images will be darker in some and lighter in others. So in this case I just changed my f-stop to compensate for the lighting change.

At the very end of the race, thats where I stationed myself the purple color station was the last one the runners went through and as you can tell it was pretty effective there was a purple haze all over.

Last for the final hurrah they did a group color toss. As you crossed the finish line you were given a color packet for the final toss, you could also buy color packets to toss at your friends or whoever. 

Another fun thing they had at the run was fire extinguishers full of color.

These were pretty effective and made for some pretty good pictures. Next year I plan on funning the Color Me Rad run instead of sitting on the sidelines, you should too!