In this seldom-seen view, devotees of the Nine Emperor Gods go through a ceremony inviting the deities for a street procession. The temple was closed to the public during this ritual, earlier tonight.

I set the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second instead of a higher action-stopping speed. This blurred the fast moving hands a bit, capturing the fluidity and rapid movement in the scene.

So far, throughout the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, I have been using only one lens. The excellent Panasonic 7-14mm ultrawide angle lens. As with any ultra-wide angle lens, levelling is tricky due to the converging vertical lines. Usually this isn’t a problem for me but it can be messy when I am forced to crop off-centre later.

To eliminate this potential complication, I set the camera’s ratio to 1:1 (square format) while composing. I am beginning to like it as I don’t need to crop later for Instagram. With much less room for fixing framing error via cropping later, I am forced to get the framing as perfect as possible in-camera.

Try it. Live dangerously.