Every year at this time we have a 10 day Buskers Festival, where buskers and street performers from round the country and the world come to entertain the city. I work in town right on the edge of Cathedral Square which is a large (and mostly square) paved area in the heart of the city and the buskers perform there all day for this week!
So I scurried down with the camera and tripod to try my luck with shooting this pair of acrobats. They are Australian and very funy and incredibly strong and flexible. Here are some of my favourite shots, the rest are up on my Flickr page.
Pleading for Help
Loved this guy below – his face was so mobile and expressive, a wonderful subject to shoot and try and capture
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Also an excellent learning experience – I was using the 70-200 lens and I am still finding my feet as far as focussing distances and which F stop to use to get the background blurred. Looking at the images I took I would be OK going to around F6 or so, and I was around 6-8m away from the subjects, so thats quite a lot of room to play with!
Learning to See Light 
Now thats just spooky. I was sitting on the statue behind them watching. Stalking me!
If you wanted to ditch the background entirely, You would need the slightest bit more distance between the crowd behind them and the guys, (as per last pic here) I would have started with (if you are still cheating) aperture priority of around 5.6 as you guessed. Then work that magic triangle juggle ISO and Exposure comp to keep the meter centre, and shutter fast enough to stop any blur (if you didn’t have said tripod) to gauge what my manual settings should hang around.
Since they never really got that far appart from each other I suspect the DoF window for them to be in focus would still have been reasonably deep.
If you want to get super technical…
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/depth-of-field.htm
I’ll have to start taking my kit bag to work to take some myself.
How can I stalk someone that I dont even know is there? LOL. I need to play with manual settings, I have never tried manual (too afraid) – thanks for the tips
If you were behind them I was to your right on the furtherest corner of the crowd on the flat level that they were on. Almost certainly the only person there with a canon white L lens on a tripod 🙂 If its not raining too bad today I will try to go out again – I have a couple of performers marked that I want to see, and Im hoping to catch the fire jugglers in Vic Sq who are on when it gets dark at 10pm every night this week.
I enjoyed these on your Flickr stream. And now I know why they were there!