Rose Parade 2010

kw: national events, photographs, photography

Every year I watch at least part of the Rose Parade broadcast. When I lived in or near Pasadena, I went to the parade several times. Once I stayed up all night to secure a curbside spot. I remember the night better than the parade next day!
This shows a float from this morning's Tournament of Roses Parade broadcast, taken right off the TV screen with a 6Mpx camera. The moiré pattern, caused by the near-alignment of the camera's pixels with the TV's pixels, is rather objectionable, even though I used a heavy blurring step before reducing resolution.

I've worked in printing, and I recall that when printers must overlay several halftone screens, such as for a color photograph, they rotate the successive screens by about 25° to minimize moiré fringes. So I decided to rotate my camera.
I tilted the tripod mount somewhat less than 30° and shot pictures throughout the parade. This shows what one of them looks like. Once I'd loaded them to the computer, I could measure right off the picture in the image processing software: 23.4°.

This is the image above, rotated back and cropped. I did a blur step and reduced resolution.
This image of the two floats has only a trace of remaining moiré. You have to look for it (try clicking to get a bigger image, and search there).

Here is one more, without the blur step. The blurring inherent in reducing resolution has done a good enough job.
I just had to have one pic of the PCC color guard (I wasn't quick enough to get a shot of the band). Not only did I attend PCC for a while in the 1960s, but my mother was valedictorian of her class when she graduated from PJC (It used to be called Pasadena Junior College) in 1942.