Liverpool Chinese New Year

It’s been a while since I went to Chinese New Year as a normal every day human. I’m often commissioned to photograph it so it was nice to experience it in a more casual light. This meant I was free to take any photos with any camera and so I took my Leica’s in an attempt to better understand them. They are interesting beasts.

Looking at my results in Lightroom and I took 351 photos in total. After my review process I ended up with 19 from the Leica Q and 6 from the Leica M240. I constantly ask my self was the M240 worth it? I haven’t found an answer to that yet. But that’s a discussion for another day.

So. Chinese New Year. I’ve been visiting for a while and I had hoped that armed with new cameras I would produce fresh new photography. What I found was that I so easily slipped into old habits. Get close up to the main thing and photograph the action. I was basically doing my job. It’s good that I can easily slip into that mode when needed but I didn’t need to. I wanted to do something new. I bought my flash as I’m really enjoying using flash outdoors now but I just couldn’t get enough light from it. It wasn’t until later on that I noticed the darn diffuser was on. No wonder I wasn’t getting much light. Still, the shots when that worked looked good. I discuss the process and results of photographing Chinese New Year more with images in my latest vlog.

Chinese New Year in Liverpool has always been a crowd pleaser and this year the council and the Chinese Community really went all in. I missed the light up dragons in the evening (late lunch break) but they had light up dragons! That’s very cool. The whole event was really a step up from last year and very well done. The fireworks off the arch were pretty amazing too. I think, for me, I preferred the projection display from last year but that could simply be because it was the first time I’d seen such a thing there so I’m a bit more attached to that. Either way it’s great seeing this sort of event in town and I look forward to next year.