May Day is Lei Day - 5/1/2012

Every First of May is the Lei Festival at Kapiolani Park. This year, being on a work day, I decided to take time off to see the many leis and festivities. There were leis of many colors and entertainment. Too bad I got there too late and missed the introduction of the May Day court and saw the photos in the newspapers today.
Last time I took a 50mm lens and it was too short, so this year I used the 70-200mm and I think it worked out better.  There were demonstrations on making leis.. it was too crowded so I just took some shots and moved on.

There were yarn and ribbon leis on display.

This was the line to look at the lei contest display. I was thinking, Hey..why isn't any one else working today?!  I decided to wait in line and at least it was moving along slowly. 

The Lei contest starts with the different entries by age group.. this group are leis made by ages 5 and below...

There were hat Haku leis category and may other types of leis. I didn't know they had so many different names.  Next time I'll take notes of the names.

I took lots of photos and decided to organize my photos by color of the rainbow.. here's RED..this is from the ribbon/yarn category..

ORANGE.

YELLOW..

GREEN..

This was the Mayor's Grand Prize Winner..

Blue..

Purple

There were performances..From the previous shoot, I learned about using Aperture Priority for the models so I decided to use F2.8 for these.  I think i overexposed them a lot, so had to do some fixing w/ PSE.

This performer came and sat right in front of me so  decided to use her colorful lei and hair piece in my shot.  It was a great half day.. next year, I'm going to come earlier.