As promised yesterday, here are some photos of performing musical clowns for you. The stars of the hour-long show were definitely the junior members of the troupe, which was just as well as I could only really focus on them from where I was standing. The smallest boy spent most of the time looking back at the adult performers behind him, until the last shot in this sequence, when he must have spotted a family member in the crowd. The name of the group is Nifu Nifa.

These are the last mountain/coastline shots - tomorrow will see a complete change of pace with some photos of performing musical clowns :-)

During our visit to the north of Tenerife we had a quick walk around one of the many small villages. Emilio, our guide, even got the local priest to unlock the church so that we could peek inside - now that’s what I call being helpful! This particular village sat precariously between the sea and the mountains.

We were lucky enough to be given a guided tour of the North of Tenerife by somebody who lives on the island (thanks Emilio!). It’s a very mountainous region with a few small villages which feel like a world away from the bustling streets of the capital, Santa Cruz.

The Santa Cruz coastline is dominated by the docks, with huge passenger ferrys, freight ships and tall cranes piercing the skyline. Unusually for a busy port, you can pretty much wander freely around, and it also conveniently allows fine views of the rest of the city.

After a slight delay caused by the arrival of a new PC (!), here’s the second part of my Tenerife Auditorium photographs.

The Tenerife Auditorium, designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava,  is a magnificient addition to the Santa Cruz coastline and is visible from many parts of the city. It has a mosaic exterior that glistens in the sunlight (but unfortunately looks a bit grubby when it’s overcast). Here is the first part of a series of photographs of this very modern building.

Some random photographs that don’t fit into any of the hypothetical boxes that I’m trying to categorise my Tenerife photos into (despite there being a large number of different boxes…). Hence the title “Miscellaneous Moments”.

A rather grand, albeit modern, building in the centre of Santa Cruz, and a clever sculpture in the visual arts area of the city ( I somehow managed to walk past it for several days running, despite it being as tall as me).

Like any other big city, Santa Cruz has its fair share of graffiti. Unlike other cities, it seems to be an accepted part of the landscape, with some very artistic images that haven’t been written over by other graffiti artists or scrubbed away by the local authorities.

A few photos from in and around the Plaza de Espana in Santa Cruz, Tenerife.

The Plaza de Espana is the principal square in the city of Santa Cruz, Tenerife. During the Carnival it was also the centre of the celebrations that took place every night, until the not-so-early hours of the morning (we often saw revellers returning home at 8am in the morning). These photos were all taken round and about the square.

Some of the performers at the Santa Cruz were, well, let’s just say a little strange. Especially the troupe of Michael Jackson lookalikes who all filed past in strict military formation, emerging out of the darkness and then disappearing a few seconds later.

And the less said about the third photo, the better…

The Carnival in Santa Cruz featured several extragantly decorated, motorized floats that each carried an equally extravagant Carnival Queen. I think that there was a Queen for each neighbourhood in the city, with one being voted as the overall winner. These photos were all taken at the Opening Parade.

Here are a few more shots from the picturesque town of La Orotava in Tenerife.

We only had a few hours to look around the small hillside town of La Orotava in the North of Tenerife, but luckily the weather was gloriously sunny and the town was something of a photographer’s paradise. My favourite photo of the day was not taken in La Orotava, however, but in the much, much more touristy city of Peurto de la Cruz, just a short bus journey away. The last photo of 4 tourists unknowingly resting under a Holy Cross is one of my favourites of the entire trip.

My first taste of the Tenerife Carnival was at the opening parade in Santa Cruz, which was a prelude to the main parade happening a week later. Curiously the event was scheduled to start at 7pm, just as night was falling, which made for some interesting shooting conditions given the speed at which the perfomers walked/danced past us. The parade was a very colourful affair, despite the gloomy light, and there were some great costumes - watch out for the Michael Jackson troupe, coming soon :-)  First up are the chickens and the clowns…

From a technical point of view, these photos were all taken in near-darkness, with only the streetlamps and a Canon 420ex flashgun providing the light. Consequently my new Tamron 28-75mm Di lens was locked at a wide-open aperture of F/2.8 and ISO was set to 800 on the Canon EOS 10D. Despite this shutter speeds ranged from anywhere between 1/125th and 1/10th second, which resulted in the “creative blur” found in most of the shots. The Tamron lens performed very well, with the autofocus locking on to the subject despite the dark conditions, and the f/2.8 aperture blurring the backgrounds nicely. The 28-75mm (equivalent to 45-120mm on the 10D) zoom range proved very versatile for this event and I used the lens exclusively all night. I’ll be posting a review of this lens soon.

I’ve just finished downloading the 5,014 photos that I took during my recent trip to Tenerife. A quick calculation reveals that’s an average of 500 photos a day, equivalent to 140 rolls of 36-exposure film, which at ?5 per roll to process would have cost me £700. Thank God I’m using a digital camera!

Anyway, enough about the financial side of things, are the photos any good?! Well, here are a few to kick off what may turn out to be an extensive series. I’ve decided to try and make sense of all those photos by breaking them down into geographical location. So here is the Iglesia de la Concepci?n, a church that was just round the corner from my hotel (the Anaga).