Svetka and Yannis invited us to see a performance given by some dancing group in the CTO center in Germasoia village. Olga and I didn’t have anything better to do so we went there to enjoy the performance.
The show plot was a reenactment of a traditional Cyprus marriage. There was a small scene downstairs filled with about 20 actors, amphitheatre filled with audience (mostly tourists), and us sitting on the top row of it.
Firstly few words about the performance. It was terrible. It was very slow and extremely boring. I’ve seen funerals which were more fun than this marriage. Not only it was boring to me and not only it was boring to all the audience, but it was also boring to the actors and musicians themselves. You could feel it. You could see it. And as if being boring is not enough a tortue by itself, it was also very long. It took them about two hours to finish. We almost left 5 minutes before the end. Few people left for real. But that was not all. After they finished with the show they started to feed the audience with some traditional dish (presumably made of beans) that looked and smelled horrible. Luckily I was hiding behind the camera and sitting in the furtherst row, so I didn’t have to eat it. :)
Secondly, few words about photographing the event. It was pretty dark and I still have only the on-camera built-in flash, so I had to use ISO1600 settings. The location I was sitting in was exactly in the middle of the range of both of my lenses. 18-55 was too short and couldn’t zoom into the scene. 75-300 was too telescopic and I had problems fitting stuff into the frame. I stayed with 75-300 since it could provide with some details on facial expressions and the like. Now, using on-camera flash unit together with 75-300 produced really ugly results with people’s eyes. The flash was too close to the camera which rendered red-eye reduction functionality pretty useless. The eyes were not red, but they glow unnaturaly. Easy to fix in Gimp or Adobe Photoshop, but still… Lots of movement by the actors also didn’t help much. I’ve made about 260 pictures, 160 of which are being uploaded for the web as I write it.
The photo album for the event is here.