Sometimes good things happen very unexpected and that is one thing that makes life as exciting as it is.

So, while I was in London for my street photography workshop someone told me that there was a big event going down and it happened to be the world famous Notting Hill Carnival. I’ve heard about it before but I had no idea how big that event gets and that it attracts more than a million people each year. Of course, it was at the same time as the workshop but it was also a great opportunity to shoot and luckily my students thought the same way.

On Sunday early afternoon we went and were greeted by an overwhelmingly big crowd. It took a litte to get into the groove but then it was a lot of fun to shoot. We focused mainly on the parade which went on for a long time and after 4 or 5 hours we left the place because the noise and the massive crowd were tiring and we were starting to get very hungry and also the toilets were a little gross to say the least.

I only had the Leica Q2 Monochrom with me and my little flash that came very handy that afternoon. Well, some might think that it isn’t a good idea to shoot such a colorful event in black and white but I’d disagree. To me, the colors were a little too much and distracting and especially with the flash the photos came out great in monochrome.

Normally, I use a color filter on my Q2M but this time I was shooting without any filters and if you are wondering why I was shooting at ISO800…. simply because I wanted to give the flash an easier time. I was shooting at 1/8 power and the batteries lasted all day long for a couple hundred photos.

The good thing about the Q2(M) is the leaf shutter that makes it very easy to control the ambient light because the camera can sync the flash at any given speed up to 1/2000.

My aperture was set to f/16 to get as much in focus as possible because there was so much going on and I wanted to get very close. And of course I was using manual focus which was set to 1m for most of the shots.

Shooting The Notting Hill Carnival With The Q2M

Leica Q3 and Low Light

Was It Worth It To Get Up This Early?