Crash, snap and wallop at medieval fair

ONE of the joys of living in Somerset and near Dorset are the people I get to meet.
Many of my  assignments involve taking pictures of charity events and on Saturday I saw that the annual Medieval Fair was taking place at Ham Hill – a wonderful event, organised by the country rangers with the help of their friends and volunteers.
It’s one of those events where I could easily have freelanced it out, but I knew there were good pictures to be had. Having said that,  an hour before I set off it started to rain, and I nearly talked myself out of going.

Parking is always a little way from the event so I travelled light and took only my Nikon 80-200mm lens and my Fujifilm X100T. Sometimes photographers  will have too much choice in their camera bags, with two or three cameras, three or four lenses and flash guns.
 Don’t get me wrong, they were all in the boot of the car, but when walking around the countryside it pays to travel light.
Strong winds and stunning views distracted me at first as I was spending valuable time capturing the vista instead of the event.
There were loads of families enjoying all sorts of medieval pastimes, archery, coin making and armed combat with wooden swords to name a few. But when time is involved – I promised my wife I would only be an hour  – setting up pictures takes too long, so a more candid approach was required.
Also, the elements were not on my side. One of the rangers had already warned me that a big dirty rain cloud was about to join us from the west.
I heard the clash of swords on shields and headed to the main arena where a mock battle between two groups of knights and their foot soldiers was taking place.

Unfortunately the area was roped off and I was too far away for the X100T, so the zoom was called into action. Mock battles are great but you are still looking for the picture to tell the story of the day. I set the camera to 800asa so I could get a good shutter speed and a respectable depth of field. I settled for 500s at F5.6 in the end and just kept clicking.
As always with anything involving movement, if you see a picture by the time you have pressed the shutter you have invariably missed the moment. So it’s best to pre-empt what may happen and set the camera to continuous and shoot with small bursts. Its the difference between taking a picture with the sword laying limp at the knights side with  the shield in front of his face, or the sword in mid air and about to land on his opponent.
I even shot a few seconds of video when the knight left the battle and walked over to the crowd. I thought maybe he was going to put on an act and challenge someone to a duel but no, he just wanted to know the time.
It was time for the heavens to open and they did. So with my cameras tucked inside my coat I walked back to my car which took me passed the food vans. No queues but when I walked around the back I was found families had taken shelter from the driving rains, and my final snap of the day was in the can.
Roll on next year.