I can’t believe that a whole year has passed since the last Carnaval Parade in San Francisco. This year’s event must have been the largest ever. The parade lasted nearly four hours.

I had planned to put a few shots up and link the rest into some sort of photo album, but after looking at the images for a few hours, decided instead to give them all to you here at full resolution. They are just too stunning IMHO, to be viewed at anything but the maximum resolution your monitor and broadband connection can handle.

UPDATE: I just got linked at the official Carnaval San Francisco web site. It’ll be interesting to see how much new traffic this generates! 🙂

I wasn’t sure about my choice of lens and the decision to carry along my flash, but it turns out that a decent quality zoom lens and flash are the perfect combination for an event such as this. I used a Nikkor 28-85 f2.8 and a Nikon SB-800 flash for all but the last few shots.

At this point I decided to take a few shots with my Sigma 80-400 mm lens. No flash.

So, you say you’d like your digital images to look like these. It’s easy! Here’s how.

• Get your hands on the finest digital camera you can buy and a few accessories – a couple lenses and a good flash should do.
• Attend the most colorful and lovely event imaginable on a perfect day in San Francisco.
• Set the camera for high quality and low contrast. Set the flash to fill, 1/3 of a stop underexposed.
• Point the camera in the right direction, push the button.
• Repeat.
• Call on your 15 years of PhotoShop experience to select, color-correct, sharpen, resize and otherwise perfect the 10 gigabytes of image data you captured.
• Upload the results to your blog.

Simple!