[MulaPhoto]

Hola,
I live in a small inland mountain town called Mula in central Murcia, España. Once a year on the Tuesday before Easter exactly at midnight, in the Ayuntamiento Plaza - town hall square,between 5/10,000 tamboristas (drummers) start druming, this goes on, day and night for 4 days as groups walk around the medieval and modern parts of the town banging the drums to drive out the bad spirits and devils before Easter Sunday.
They start practicing (another excuse to make more noise than usual), the week before Xmas, and every evening walk up and down our calle (street) to band practice belting hell out the drums. After 4 years, my wife and I are getting used to the noise, but our elderly Sheltie dog, who we brought with us from England has a different opinion and barks her head off, drowning out any hope of listerning to the radio or television.
The traditional dress is a black kaftan and sometimes a hood and a coloured sash around the waist.
This photo, taken on Sunday was of the very young tamboristas who were giving a demonstration
Hope this is of interest
John

[wulinka]

their drumming must be quite spectacular, I wish I could be there once.

your shots are really good. I like the capture of these kids.

Excuse me if you mentioned it, but what camera are you using? There is a stunning, almost
unusual sharpness (or edge contrast?) to your shots that I am curious about.

Greetings! Uli

[MulaPhoto]

Hi Uli, thanks for the comments:
This image was taken using my Cannon 300D with the kit lens. Aperature Priority and RAW format
My workflow is as follows:
Download RAW files and open in Adobe Lightroom 1.3, sort and rate.
Open Lightzone 3.1, select image and use this excellent software to process the RAW image...you can adjust individual zones to extract detail, light sharpen image 300,0.5.0 and save as a TIFF
Open TIFF in Adobe CS2, crop resize and then using Power Retouche plug in Sharpen, 100,0.6,0..I then used Noise Ninja just to get rid of a little chroma noise...the images at 400 ISO from the Cannon have more noise than my Pentax K100D, which is almost noise free even at 800 ISO.
Fially save as a JPG
Regards
John

[Don Schaeffer]

Neat! This is a first hand account of another far away place.

[matthew]

Thanks for the photo and the story, it's great to hear about life in other parts of the world. It must be quite the festival.

For the photo, I might suggest cropping out the girl who's only partially included on the right, and tightening the frame a little on the three children in the front.

That's a very extensive post-processing routine. What percentage of your photos get the full treatment?

[Irma]

Hola Juan...

It is always interesting to see and learn about tradition and custom from other countries... Very beautiful picture of this little ones. Three different moods and personalities.

[nia]

This is unforgettable picture for me. How beautiful these children! You got this picture so well. I can imagine the sound of their drums By the way it was interesting to read this black kaftan, "kaftan" is Turkish word and same meaning! I am sure coming from Ottoman culture. Sultan was wearing something like that. How nice to meet into historical times too by this picture. Mula seems so beautiful place now in my mind, I visited your web site and yes, I loved Mula and sure because of your beautiful photos. Thank you,

Blessing and Happiness,
with my love,
nia