Ugh...try sleeping with a headache.  It just isn't working tonight. So, since I can't sleep and the headache isn't going away anytime soon, how about a few pictures from Oranje 2011?

The Indy Oranje festival   is a one night festival/party/art and music festival on the near north side of Indianapolis.  This year was the 10th anniversary and I was fortunate to be able to photograph all of the fun.  I was also fortunate enough to work this event with my girlfriend, Rene, who was in charge of the VIP room. This was her second time working at Oranje and my first time, and I'm already looking forward to next year.  One thing is for certain, I plan on bringing much more extra cash next year and buy some of the art on sale.  So much fantastic art and so little money.  Oh well, I have a year to plot and plan.

One of the first photographs I took was of two models from a local studio called Bombshell Photography.  This picture was made outside and did I mention I was using a hotshoe flash that had only arrived the day before the event?   Talk about having a steep learning curve. I had used a hotshoe flash with my SLR, however it died a few years ago and I spent Friday night chasing the cats around the house trying to get used to the flash and hopefully to avoid bad photos at Oranje.  After burning through a battery pack (speaking of batteries, it's time to get some Sanyo Eneloops for the flash)

 These ladies were a lot of fun to shoot and thankfully they posed for several pictures.  The settings for this picture are:  f5.6, 1/50th and the ISO was 400.  I thought about setting my ISO to 100 or 200, but I wasn't sure of how the picture would turn out. It was very dark outside and like I said earlier, I was still basically experimenting with the flash settings.

This next picture is from Joy Carter's booth.  She had several very nice pieces of art hanging on her walls, but the main attraction were the two models that she body painted before and during the show.  The 'day of the dead' must have been painted during the day as she was on display from the minute the show opened   She also had a infinite amount of patience to put up with all of the requests to photograph her and to be photographed with her. My girlfriend, Rene was working as the hostess for the VIP room and I texted her to come upstairs and we both had our pictures taken with the "day of the dead" model. They make for great facebook avatars.  The little devil next to her was painted during the evening by Joy Carter.  She was also quite the center of attention during and after she was painted.  I think the two of them make a great picture.  This was made at f5.6, 1/60th and ISO 800.  I'm still not sure why I was shooting at ISO 800 in this area, plenty of light...could have been I was tired, this was done well after midnight.  Still, I like it a lot.

No article about Oranje would be complete without a picture of Tatu Billy the Witch Doctor.  He had some wonderful art in his booth and also had a fortune teller who was getting a lot of attention.  I hope she was able to give people some good news.  Yes, the snake around Billy's neck is real and was quite content to just hang out with Billy.  I love the clothes and the staff and I'm still surprised that Billy graduated several years after me from Manual H.S.  It just goes to show that you never can tell what will come out of your high school or neighborhood.  This shot was made at f9, 1/50th and ISO 400.  I'm not sure if I was experimenting with flash too much that night or what, but the camera settings were all over the place that night.  Still, they came out very well and I'm happy with the results.