Adventures in Camera land
ADVENTURES IN CAMERA LAND - Crowds can be a good place to get candid
shots, or not. On a recent Friday night, we went to see the Easter Bunny
and some Green Berets parachute into a sea of over-sugared children, a
relatively normal thing in my hometown. I was prepared to get nothing.
In 2024, taking any kind of undercover picture of a child gets you an
automatic assignment to the creep bin, even if you're not in the least
bit creepy, like me. As we headed toward the landing zone, I did manage
to quickly get the cooperation of a college-aged couple for a quick
street portrait beside the library. The lady in the equation seemed
flattered and was just as cooperative as she could be. The guy gave me
one of those "I'm just doing this for her" kind of looks. Snap, snap,
snap. It was all over in less than a minute.
The closer we got to the Easter Bunny's future home, the more difficult
it became to take child-free images. Kids are cute, but I wanted some
shots of parents not in the image of Dr. Huckstable (please) or the ilk.
Give me a tatted-up hipster with gauged ears pushing a baby carriage.
Those guys were everywhere. And in between them and my camera were a sea
of aggravated parents asking themselves why in the hell they volunteered
for this bedlam. I may have been projecting. I don't know.
Since I couldn't get what I wanted to get, I looked for targets of
opportunity. My scant few years of military training from back in cold
war days served me well. I saw the best picture of the night walking
toward me. I pressed the shutter button and held it down until my camera
got tired. Yay team, we got one.
The next day we went to the zoo because there are never any kids at the
zoo. What?
Actually, Wonder Woman is a pretty whiz-bang animal photographer and she
wanted to go the zoo and I like going places with her, so I went to the
zoo too. And, I took my camera. And, I saw a cute kid. And his grandpa.
And, no I didn't get a picture of them. Because god hates me.
But, my wife loves me. At her suggestion we went to Raleigh, a city with lots of sidewalks with people walking on them. She dropped me off and headed for a nice peaceful botanical garden. I managed to stumble almost immediately into a Lebanese-American street festival. Dancers! Music! Hummus! Pita! And, pictures, finally, finally, finally some pictures. I got street vendors in pink wigs, old men dressed like Johnny Carson sketches, coeds smoking hookahs and crowds of people paying me no attention. I was in heaven.