Lion Dance, Chinese New Year 2023 – Austin, Texas

With my 2022 New York City coverage in the history books, I’m turning my attention to more recent local Austin events. After a three-year hiatus, the Chinese New Year Celebration was back in Austin.

In January 2020, I shot the festive events at a Buddhist Temple off of Loop 360. I was excited to test my then-new Fujifilm GFX 50R, my first medium-format camera. However, a strange illness was brewing in Asia, which of course, shut down the world. It took much longer than I ever expected for the world to recover.

I returned to the same temple this year, though with very different gear. I brought one lens, the Fujifilm 50mm f1.0, purchased primary for portraits. Though available for other purposes, I was itching to create extremely shallow depth-of-field images — very different from my previous coverage.

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