This was the Melbourne Color Run festival after-party on Sunday, as seen from the outside. Want to know what it looked like inside that colour-cloud?

They call the Color Run "the happiest 5k on earth" and it possibly is. Certainly for the 12,500 of us who showed up at Flemington Racecourse on the weekend, there was a lot of joy, a lot of laughter, and a disturbing lot of men in tutus.

In fact it was so much fun that Yours Truly got caught up in the moment and moved over from the left-hand "walkers and dancers" side of the track to the bona fide right-hand "runners" side. With a bit of dancing and skipping thrown in for good measure. Ok I might have stopped to walk up a hill or two but, as my friend Tons said, "Interval training is better for us, anyway."

In case you couldn't make it out to Flemington on Sunday, I risked my beloved camera to capture a little taste of the Color Run just for you.

All those white headbands and long socks at the start. It was like a fabulously bizarre 70s convention.

The colour-proof camera

If you're wondering what it takes to keep a camera safe on the inside of a colour run, the answer is a lot of little extras and in many cases the willingness to click from the hip without actually seeing what you're photographing. With a big thanks to my dad for the advice and the gear, here's how I did it.

(I use an Olympus Pen E-P3 camera. It's compact and fabulous. For the run, I attached a zoom lens. That actually made photographing the crowd a LOT more difficult, but I chose the long lens because the hood I planned to use to keep some of the colour off was much bigger and longer than the one for my ordinary lens.)

1. storm hood (normally for rain)  2. lens hood (normally to prevent flares)  3. clear lens filter  4. 40-150 zoom lens  5. rubber air pump (to remove fine dust)

That storm hood was fantastic. There's a draw-string at either end of it, so it tightens around your camera lens at the front and over the actual camera at the back. As soon as the run started, I put the settings on Auto, stuck my hand inside the hood, and clicked away happily the whole time. I wasn't able to see what I was photographing because to open the hood and look inside would have exposed the camera to the colour-storm that was going on all around me. But that just made it all-the-more fun when it came to sorting through the photos later.

How was your weekend, friend? Did you spot any colour?

ps. Blogger attends Color Run, enters insane and awesome blue cloud, doesn't realise that camera is a) on and b) set to video:

ps2. If you subscribe to this blog today, I'll give you a free book. No strings. Details here. Not that you need any extra incentive, after a film-making extravaganza like this.