Fiesta

Our church held their 65th annual church fiesta this weekend.  They always host it on Mother's Day weekend and it's the 2nd or 3rd largest event the city has each year.  Many times in the past, we've been elsewhere, but in the past 10 years or so, we just enjoy the weekend, eating the great food, hanging out with friends and enjoying the live music played there.


My wife is in a jazz group called 11th Hour and two years ago they played at the fiesta to open up the Saturday that weekend.  Small but appreciative crowds were on hand as is usually the case at noon on Saturday.  The fiesta really gets hopping around dinner time both Friday and Saturday and it lasts all the way to 10PM both nights.

The past two years, I've played around with some long exposure settings on my camera.  I really didn't know how to do it very well last year and was just getting 4 second exposures, mainly because I didn't know how to set my camera on the bulb setting.  I fixed that over the past year, learning how to use my camera more and more in the manual setting.


This year, I got several shots that I'm quite pleased with.  The second shot looks like a giant slinky about to tumble over a staircase.  While, I'll never understand the fascination of spinning around and around in circles for five minutes and then throwing up (I exaggerate a little here), but the light trails on these things really lend themselves nicely to some interesting shots.  There were no rollercoasters at the fiesta, so the thrill seekers had to be content with the spinning rides or the bumper cars.


Each year, our church makes a nice profit from the fiesta which helps funds the school there and other things throughout the year.  Even in these tough economic times, it seems that people are willing to spend some money having a little fun in Claremont.