Dress Rehearsal

It's taken me a while (among many other distractions) to sort through this day's images. This was the final dress rehearsal for the May 9 Victory Day parade.  For once, the public was allowed to have a reasonably direct view of the parade (or at least the part coming off Red Square).  As ever,  there were thousands of spectators most of whom seemed to be filming the event on their mobile phones - so it was a continual challenge to move between moving heads, hands and phones.  I used my Tamron 150-600 mm lens to reach over the crowd - and over the Moscow River running between us and the parade.  This lens is not nearly as sharp as the Canon 70-200 but gives a decent performance in bright light and strong contrast.

I wanted to capture the colour of the troops having blipped other views (on May 5 and May 9) but have added a few extras with aerial stuff too.