How I Shot the Holi Festival in India

Shooting events with a ton of people can always be a bit overwhelming at times. There are thing constantly happening all around you, pulling your attention in every direction. Add to this being in another country and at an event such as the Holi festival, and you have a recipe for mass mental chaos. In order to combat this, I went to India with a pretty deliberate plan on how I wanted to shoot.

First thing's first, for those that don't know, the Holi festival is the celebration of Spring as well as the celebration of good winning over evil. The main way it’s celebrated is with the use of colored powder and water. This colored powder is thrown into the air, thrown at people, and even physically rubbed onto peoples faces. For the water, this is thrown with buckets, water balloons, sprayed with hoses, and can even come from shower heads spraying from all around you if you are in a certain temple.  

Protection

Because of these adverse shooting conditions, camera protection is a must have. Most reading online about how to protect your camera will lead you down the path of using plastic bags and a lot of tape. While this seemed to work for most people I saw, it doesn't quite inspire confidence when really getting into the thick parts of the celebration. Knowing this, I decided to go with a more robust protection in the form of an underwater housing from Aquatech. I won't go into too much detail about the housing since I wrote a full review already, but this housing really did allow me to fully submerge myself into shooting and completely forget about trying to keep my camera gear safe.

Aside from camera protection, it’s also a good idea to think about protecting yourself. Some of the colored powder that is used can be very harsh on your skin and hair. It also has the potential to stain your skin and clothes. To prevent this from happening, we used a small bottle of hair oil (though any type of oil should do the job) in order to give a layer of protection over our skin and hair. I also wore a pair of cheap white pants and a white shirt that I was prepared to throw away after the event. Not only did this make it so I could not worry about my clothes, but it also gave a nice visual of just how colorful I was from all the powder. I also carried around a small Ziploc bag where I kept extra batteries, my wallet, and phone.

Camera and lens

One of my favorite things to do when I’m dealing with situations that have a lot going on, is limit myself. This may seem a bit counter intuitive. Most people go into a complex situation wanting to be prepared for anything. They may bring a bag of lenses in order to cover anything that happens or they may throw on one of those crazy zoom lenses that can go from 18mm to 250mm. While there is nothing wrong with this, I find that having too many options can cause more issues than solutions. Not only are you left bouncing around changing lenses or focal lengths, but you are also busy looking for anything and everything to shoot.

Because of this, I decided to go with a single Fuji X-T2 and the 23mm f/2 lens (35mm equivalent). Not only is this focal length perfect for all purpose storytelling photography, but being limited to just this lens allows me to concentrate on what I can shoot well. No longer am I chasing things down by zooming or changing a lens. Instead, I look for things to capture and I get to where I need to be to do that. If I cant get there, then I ignore what's going on and look for something I can capture. This style of shooting really makes you open your eyes and see what's going on and intentionally plan how you want to shoot it. You are now in a box and all you care about is what's inside the box or how you can move that box.    

Light

In a similar fashion to how I limited myself with my camera gear, I also limited myself with the type of light I was willing to shoot. This may seem like a weird way to limit yourself, but hear me out. In the above example I talked about limiting your focal length so that you were sort of trapped in a box. Now imagine if you could only shoot a certain type of thing in that box. It now becomes pretty apparent when and where you need to move the box in order to shoot. This is what I did with my light. By only shooting subjects that were in direct light, I developed a sort of spider sense to all the little strips and patches of direct light all around me. If I didn't see any direct light inside my box, then I knew I needed to move.

Once the sun went down, I kept to the same task at hand, but this time I was on the lookout for anything that could produce light. If there wasn't a subject in that light, then I waited or I looked for another place to shoot from. This is where it can get complicated. How long do I wait? Is that spot over there better? It sort of becomes like fishing. Thankfully there are times where the fish can just jump into your boat, or in this case, a guy waves a giant flame around and then has flower petals thrown above him.

For all the times where there was not direct light and I didn't have the option to move, I didn't simply not shoot at all. In these situations I just looked for interesting compositions, subjects, moments, or hopefully a combination of all three.

Have you ever given yourself limits to help narrow what you concentrated on? What kinds of things help you focus on what you can do well and ignore everything else? You can also see more images from this shoot on my blog.