
Zombies! Coming to eat my brains..

Lurching zombies having a bad hair day
Today I was Event Photographer for the first Zombie Run held in CHCH http://zombierun.co.nz/
Held at Orton Bradley Park in lovely established forest, parklands and native bush, being surrounded by bird song and the shrieks and screams of runners was an entertaining experience. I volunteered to shoot today after contacting the organisers when I saw they were holding this event, and they welcomed me along. Sometimes it pays to be cheeky and just ask straight out if they need photographers 🙂
I met a pack of zombies along the walk to my position and they kindly posed horrifically for me LOL

Oh poor Teddy!

The guy in the white is a chef….
The makeup was really quite good and the blood was splashed liberally over everyone – apparently its a mix of syrup, chocolate sauce and colouring. Today I uttered the fateful words “Sounds tasty but I’m not going to lick any Zombies today!”

This lovely lady is a veteran from Wellington, apparently its habit forming
The blood looked quite effective once soaked into fabric and dried a bit. The zombies provided their own clothes for the event but were decorated by a crack zombie makeup team (I didn’t have time to drop in on them sadly)

Lovely makeup effect
The zombies that I spent a couple of hours with were great fun and excellent sports and happy to pose for silly photos. Because of impending exams to study for I only attended half the event, still took away LOADS of pix as the organisers wanted lots of the runners, but the first shots I got were of zombies.
From a technical POV it was quite challenging, I had to fluff around with settings several times before I got a combo that worked. I had the 17-55mm lens on, and ISO up to 1000 and then shooting in Tv mode at around 1/250th sec got shots fast enough to catch the runners as they were going by at speed. It was quite shady where I was hence the high ISO, but one of the things I love about the 7D is that it allows me to go that high and the noise is minimal.
I hope if they have another event I get to go along, had a great time and got some interesting shots for my portfolio 🙂
Do they look real to you?

Wow, did these people do their own make-up? or was there a team to horrify them?
there was a team of makeup people there but I didn’t get to meet them
These are great photos. The make-up on most of them looks really convincing. Were you completely exhausted by the time you were done?
I was tired cos I was there for 3 hours and had a bit of walking to do but it was such fun that I didn’t really feel it til I got home and started uploading all the pix. Then you see the great pix you get and get all enthusiastic all over again, that the thrill of photography 🙂
They really did make an effort for it to feel real, and from the shrieks and screams we got (and the guys as well LOL) it seemed to have the desired result.
I agree, that is the fun of photography, you get to relive the experience.
That is so cool that the people were so enthusiastic about participating.