Halloween, Greenwich Village

The Village Halloween Parade. The parade has long since surpassed the narrow streets of Greenwich Village. It starts in Soho and  is conducted up 6th Avenue. I don’t know exactly how many people attend. But it is easily a  million. The avenue is lined with spectators six deep from Canal Street to 16th Street. There are as many marching participants as want to come down and get into the action. About as many people are along the sidelines and spill over into Greenwich Village. In fact some of the more interesting costumes have been on the side streets. I got there early this year. Finally! The girl in the picture is half naked and getting body painted. It’s a tradition, I guess. The group that organizes this seems to have new girls each year who submit to the arduous process of being painted in front of horde of photographers. It was chilly but not bitter cold like last year. Even so the girls were pretty chilled anyway. Well, what do you do to make a pretty half naked girl smile. Try this guy. He wandered onto the block with blood dripping and with a New York attitude. Yeah, she laughed. I just went over the images on a first pass to edit. There were 1659. I will whittle the number down to a more manageable few and then post more images here and on my other blog which was set up to do galleries. How did I pick this image? Just randomly, because there were so many and I usually don’t have a signature image with so many choices.

About half the images were shot with flash. My secret is to use a Quantum rechargeable battery. It recycles quickly so there’s no lag. And I ran up the ISO to 320 this year in order to extend the battery life. I didn’t trust the system so I bought along another battery and flash just in case. I could try off camera flash or a diffuser but it’s Halloween and the images with direct flash have an edgy feeling. And, that’s what it’s about.

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