Bavarian Oktoberfest ... from 2008

Today's post is partly nostalgic (like a couple other recent posts) and partly a move to get these pictures on the blog's official record.

The shoot featured herein is a look at the annual Bavarian Oktoberfest, which is held in Old Heidelberg Park in Glendale, Wis., a north suburb of Milwaukee. I took these photos Sept. 13, 2008, three months before Photo Potpourri launched (which reminds me that PP will mark its ninth anniversary on Monday).

Oktoberfest was the gathering spot picked by colleagues from my college newspaper, The Spectator, at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. It was great to see these people again, but I wish we would have done it on the weekend before or after. My long drive to Milwaukee from Indianapolis and back was marked by heavy downpours, a rainfall so bad that a lane of I-94 near Calumet was impassable for several miles on the ride up ... and parts of I-80 were under water and closed on the way home, forcing a detour that added 3 hours to my ride.

Fortunately, the rain held off on the evening we met at Old Heidelberg Park. The photos you see here were taken with a Canon 30D equipped with a Tamron 28-75mm f/2 lens. I did do some re-editing of the photos, adding some detail with the shadows slider and applying crops on occasions. I didn't use any photos involving my colleagues (which actually constituted a majority of the shoot) because I didn't contact them to obtain their permission.

As always, to view a larger and sharper version of a photo, just click on the photo. This is particularly useful if you access the blog while using a mobile device. To view a full gallery of the images from this shoot, visit the link in this sentence.

Note: When this post went live on Dec. 9, 2017, I referred to this event in the headline and text as Milwaukee Oktoberfest. I've since learned that there is an event in Milwaukee proper called Milwaukee Oktoberfest that apparently is different from the Oktoberfest I attended in Glendale in 2008. I've since gone back into the headline and text of this post to call the event pictured here as Bavarian Oktoberfest (it is presented each year, at Old Heidelberg Park, by the nearby Bavarian Bierhaus). The Milwaukee Oktoberfest apparently is a newer event -- it's been running only eight years -- and is held at Pere Marquette Park in the Milwaukee downtown area. Both parks are along the Milwaukee River (although at different points) and run weekends from the middle of September until early October. I don't know the history or the "why?" behind there competing events (the one downtown would have sprouted the year after I was at Old Heidelberg Park), but because I'm always in the pursuit of accuracy, I decided to make the aforementioned edits. To make matters even more confusing, there's supposedly a third Oktoberfest operation (one that claims to be the largest in Wisconsin history) that operates in Milwaukee, but I'm just not going to get into that here!