I chose this year to photograph the event with my Mamiya 135 telephoto attached to my trusty old Pentax Spotmatic. The 135 is a big help for getting close to the action in this type of public space.
Besides helping to fill the available frame space with the primary subject, the restricted depth of focus of the long lens provides additional separation of the foreground subject and the background, as well as enhancing the appearance of sharpness. To further emphasize these image characteristics I chose to use a fine-grained and relatively slow film, TMAX 100. That let me shoot my back-lit subjects at f-5.6 and 1/250, which was fast enough to stop action while blurring the background.
My portrayals of the parade in previous years featured pictures from my Hawkeye Flash with flipped lens, my Soviet-era Contax-copy Kiev II, and the Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.
