Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Montreal

Last weekend was Saint Patrick’s Day, we celebrated on the 17th with a box of Guinness and then on the Sunday we went and photographed the Montreal Saint Patrick’s Day parade.

Saint Patrick is the best known patron saint of Ireland and the celebrations on 17 March celebrate Saint Patrick and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. Today Saint Patrick’s Day is said to be the most widely celebrated Saint’s day in the world and its not so much a religious festival but an Irish cultural celebration – I’ll drink to that.

I recently read that in the mid 90’s the Republic of Ireland created a group called Saint Patrick’s Festival with a number of aims – mostly geared towards creating a festival of international greatness which would inspire the Irish as well as bring international awareness to Ireland as a sophisticated, creative and professional country. This group organised its first festival in 1996 – it was a one day event. The following year it had grown to three days and by 2006 it was a five day festival. I extrapolated this data in excel and predict that by 2041 the festival will be a fourteen day extravaganza with tens of millions of people attending and a stupendous quantity of Guinness consumed…

The Montreal Saint Patrick’s Day parade has run annually since 1824! That’s almost two hundred years of parades – one of the longest running Saint Patrick’s Day parades in North America.

I found the parade a great opportunity to practice my portrait photography, here are a few of the many photos I shot.

I'm-not-drunk-I'm-Irish.jpg

I'm not drunk I'm Irish

Black-&-White-with-Green-portrait.jpg

Black & White with Green all over

Beauty-Queen-Portrait.jpg

Beauty Queen

Girl-Float-Portrait.jpg

Portrait

 

Clown-Portrait.jpg

Clown Portrait

 

Busker-Guy.jpg

Montreal Busker

Hurly.jpg

Hurly

Portrait.jpg

Portrait

Old-man-HDR-effect.jpg

Top Hat Portrait

Old-Lady-in-Car-HDR.jpg

From the Car

Irish-Kid.jpg

Irish Leprechaun

Parades are a lot of fun to photograph because everyone is there to have a good time, they’re dressed up and they expect to be photographed. That said it was  beautiful clear day which made the light really hard to photograph in.

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Comments

  1. I really liked your portraits. They are so natural and lively. Thanks for sharing the pics!

    • Thank you! Personally I find portrait photography quite hard so I really tried to take advantage of the parade where you have so many colourful subjects who are happy to be photographed.

  2. Great portraits! Hope you had fun, I missed St. Patrick’s day this year unfortunately.

    • Bummer man, you’ll have to have a catchup Guinness at some point! I really enjoyed the parade, so many bright happy people to take pictures of.