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As part of a campaign to promote Taiwan, the Taiwan Tourism Bureau (TTB) held a tourism fair at IMM on Saturday and invited mandopop singer Jolin Tsai and director Wu Nien-Jen down to say a few nice things about the place. Naturally, it was a good opportunity for me to practice a bit of event photography so I was down there with my 70-200mm trying to take some good stage shots. Other than having lots of fun taking photos, it was a real pity I didn’t understand a word as the whole event was in Mandarin!

She’s got a huge goodie bag/prize with her! So, who will be The One to win it?

According to wifey, Jolin is really famous and warned me to expect a big crowd. To be honest, I’ve never heard any of her songs before but I can see why she’s so popular among teeny-boppers.

And, if they had really wanted to bring someone famous from Taiwan down, they should have invited Lin Chi Ling instead! I mean, who is this director Wu guy anyway. Haha…

Can some kind soul translate what’s on the card for me? Click on the image below for a larger version.

Gracefully answering tons of questions from the emcee.

And from the audience too.

Come Visit Taiwan, OK? ><

Photography notes:

1. Event was held outdoors at 3.30pm in overcast weather. Stage was under a big tentage.
2. Ideal settings seem to be around f/2.8-f/4, 1/60-1/125, ISO200-400.
3. Made a mistake of using ISO800 to get a fast shutter speed (> 1/250) to freeze movement on stage. In retrospect, this wasn’t necessary as Jolin wasn’t moving much, lens had VR and resultant photos had much noise (though bearable) after sharpening.
4. Used Continuous-servo AF with Dynamic Area AF (9-pt) which resulted in 80% out-of-focus pictures as the Dynamic Area AF seemed to keep refocusing on other moving people instead of Jolin who was quite still. To try Continuous-servo AF with Single-point AF in the future if subjects on stage aren’t moving much.
5. GET THERE EARLY! Reached 10 mins before the event started and there was already a row of photographers in front of me camped at all the good spots. Using a 70-200mm when standing 50m away from the stage is a bad idea as photos have to be cropped almost 80% to get reasonable pics. And, I suspect focusing doesn’t work well when the subject is so far away. Need to test this more.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Photography, Special. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.