Beltane 2013

For the past two years I have photographed the Beltane Fire Festival (30th April, Calton Hill, Edinburgh) as a member of the audience. It has become my favorite event of the year to photograph, but it's hard to get close to the action with all the crowds... So this year I decided to try to get into the official photographers group.

I did (along with my wife), and it's a lot of hard work (lots of practices and other activities to photograph in the 8 or 9 weeks leading up to the event) but really more than worth it, as well as being great fun. I'm going to do it again next week for sure.

I ended up contributing over 200 photographs to the pool (out of over 600 I took) from the actual night itself. They can be seen on the Beltane Fire Society Flickr stream here.

However I thought I'd post a few favorites here too.

They were all taken with the K-5 II, DA* 50-135 and Metz 58 AF-2 flash. (Inconveniently, the flash for my wife's Canon decided to break at the last minute so she ended up using my K-5 with the Tamron 17-50 and spare Sigma flash. The K-5 is better in low light but she's much more comfortable with her Canon so it wasn't ideal for her).

Unfortunately due to the constraints of the event (particularly space and the need to move around quickly) using on-camera flash is pretty much a necessity and I know many of the shots could look better with off camera flash, but I'm very pleased with some of my shots nonetheless.


#1





#2





#3





#4





#5





#6





#7





#8





#9





#10





#11





#12





#13





#14





#15





#16





#17





#18





#19





#20

WOW - some fantastic ones there - you certainly have captured the atmosphere.

I think #2 is actually my favourite - the colours are very striking

Thanks!