PHOTOGRAPHING THE SKY LANTERN FESTIVAL

Some people may not be familiar with the “sky Lanterns”. But, the most incredible thing about the sky lanterns today is that most people who are involved in the sky lanterns usually do it with a community gathering, and then it becomes an incredible sight.

The origin of sky lanterns have changed over the years. The Chinese (according to Wikipedia) are known to have started using it originally back when the ancient Chinese wars were taking place. That could go back to A.D. 6th Century or so. They used it to send up a signals and had written messages on the lanterns to communicate to other war forces.

As it seems to have evolved now, that most of the festivals will have the person(s) writing their wish or desire on the lantern, and then sending their lantern up into heaven, or to the sky.

I recently attended a massively attended sky lantern festival in our local area, and it was held out away from the major city some 40 or so miles, where the stars were already brighter than you would see away from the city, and the impact of a large amount of these sky lanterns going up into the sky at one time would be amazing.

They had a countdown of lighting the lanterns at about 10pm and then the audience would release them all at once.

The heat from the candle or lighting device must first heat up the air inside the lantern before you can send it off into the sky.

How to take photos of all this low light situation? Taking flash photos of this event would totally ruin the atmosphere of this type of event. Yet, you want to be able to freely roam around the crowd and capture the feeling and the effect of the individuals trying to get that lanterns, with their dreams written on them, to work. So, I went all the way with my camera shooting at an ISO of 6400 !! My aperture was set as open as can be at F3.5, and then my shutter speed was letting me use a good shutter speed so I didn’t have to worry about blurry photos, mostly around 125 to 250th of a second.

To capture the smiles on faces and the accomplishment of their lanterns ready to go, is what you want to do. And then, at this festival, I think there was somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 people there to do this festival. What does it look like when you have that many lanterns in the sky at once?

And it seemed like it went like this for an hour. Some people must have had more than 1.

There goes my wife’s. It made it up, up, and away.

Can pictures do justice to this amazing event? Well, I’m not sure. It’s kind of like looking at an amazing landscape photo. Sometimes, if you are there in person, it seems more spectacular. But, photos can do a great job of capturing it in a 2D format for us to remember for a long time.

While we were waiting for the 10pm launch, we certainly had a party as well. A little fire that we could gather around and roast marshmallows and hot dogs and have a good time as a family and friends:

Roasting some hot dogs and marshmallows over a controlled fire was part of the waiting game, before the 10pm launch. This was still taken at an ISO of 6400. Notice that it still looks pretty sharp, and not grainy as I would have expected.

So, at least we can all learn from this that even in almost total darkness and just the light of what you have around you, you can take photos without flash using a high speed ISO setting, with great results.