Ok, so last night, I went to the carnival. For those of you who don’t know, a lot of photographers shoot the “carnival at night” type of work-you can probably guess (if you’ve never seen it before) the type of work I’m talking about here. Wonderful swirling lights, neon trails of color, the excitement of an entire “strange” environment lit up at night. It’s very fun to shoot, especially at first but then, after a while, it can all start to look a little bit…well….maybe “the same” would be the right way to describe it.
So, I go to the carnival and take my infrared camera. And it takes pictures. And they don’t look anything like the “normal” carnival pictures you might typically see. They look like this. This little purple guy. All whacked out, a bit odd, maybe even a bit “off” and that’s the polite way of describing them. I guess it’s safe to say, well, they aren’t “normal” not by any stretch of the imagination. Odd colors, odd shapes, weird things happening with the light, and that’s just for starters.
Now, I’ve got all these pictures of the carnival and, frankly, I really don’t know what to do with them. I don’t know what to think. I’m not sure that I like them-I mean, they don’t look like anything that I’ve seen before, and they are “weird” even for me (that’s really saying something.) On the other hand, well, I kind of like the idea that they don’t look like anything else you might happen to come across. The world is full of photographers, and every photographer has so many cameras and yet, from all of those cameras, from all of those eyes, from all that vision, not one person, not one single person who ever came before me stopped and thought to do *this.* Maybe there’s a reason for that-maybe you shouldn’t do *this.* But, then again, maybe this is creative, new, funky, cool, and makes people laugh. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making people smile, is there? I mean, are photographs (and, in turn, photographers) supposed to be miserable all of the time? Because, well, if that’s the case….
Yeah, weird, I know. And I just don’t know what to think.
Until next time…
