Sydney Easter Show life

I usually only go to the show if there is a photo idea I’ve had that might have good potential. The flying pig shot is an example of this.

It might be my main aim but there is such a large concentration of people there, other good photo opportunities are likely to arise. Not very frequently of course, but the more people the more possibilties. I can’t will a photographable scene into existence but I can move through the scene being alert to the possibility.

Anything that is worth shooting by definition hasn’t happened yet. That is, the peak moment hasn’t occured. There is potential only. Something might happen, or much more likely it won’t. But when it comes to predicting the future I’m as ignorant as anyone. (Except those with the “starry wisdom” ads in Women’s Day.) Moments arise, come to a climax and instantly decay. I see that in film, which either records the flow of life in documentaries or mimics it in movies. Motion film fills a unique role, but as a still photographer my bias is for still images. Here at leisure, the detail of life can be studied later. I tend to get a bit frustrated with films where at 24 frames per second there is often too much information for my still photography trained / inclined mind to take in. Just as I’ve begun to study the visual it cuts away or deteriorates. (The rare long held scenes by directors like Tarantino and Kubrick are exceptions.)

In that flow of life the point of completion is when my camera needs to be at work. And the only way for that to happen is by being aware some moments beforehand of the imminent potential for a worthy image. It’s an intuitive process based on….well maybe its not based on anything, except inituition. That is, the life experience which helps us to make choices. That quality is embodied by a psychological awareness developed through everything that has shaped you.I t is the mental architecture that results in the photos.

Well, enough of the technical analyis.

I’m not sure what the point of this attraction was, but I liked the light and shapes of these balls bobbing in the water.

I like the thought of things that are not able to be seen with ordinary vision. Like close ups of everyday things – minerals or plant spores for example, things otherwise hidden by our ordinary perception, and so, surprising to see. Well, things that happen really quickly are also hidden from our ordinary perception, as in the shot above. This is taken at 1/2500 of a second.

It is a full frame tele shot at 140mm and so is very difficult to get a full frame shot of something moving so fast, ie, not have to later crop in and so lose the all important megabyte size. As they swooped through the sky the timing was as critical as can be.  The composition captures a sense of descending movement – though I am sure the people strapped in were feeling that a lot more! I had no desire to join them on the ride. My days of being a human trampoline are over, if they ever really began.

Here’s another one, legs all akimbo, just before they began their violent descent.

Fairground revellers tumble through the sky.

Right about here my friend the English Professori in Barcelona (introduced in my Blue Mountains festival journal entry) has weighed in with some comments. He is pictured below in a small but significant role in a sci-fi film directed by his son Geoff.

He’s a good sport. 🙂

Dick: I could not have taken this shot, ever. You would have had only the proverbial “split second” between raising and aiming your camera and your subjects becoming aware of you. Your speed can be judged by the fact that the girl has clearly registered your presence but her face hasn’t changed its expression, as if the information from her brain has not yet had time to reach her mouth. It’s possible that whatever scene it was they were watching had the power to make them oblivious to you, but people are usually very quick to notice a camera being pointed at them. Anyway, you only had that split second in which to centre the girl in your composition AND focus on her. By the time I’d done that the whole group would have been staring angrily at me and demanding to know what I thought I was fucking doing. By now you must be able to focus and compose instinctively and almost instantly, and this photo is a great illustration of how practised you have become. It’s like watching a virtuoso guitarist’s fingers sliding unerringly from fret to fret, and always finding the right note. By the way, what were these people in the photo looking at?

Barry: I was obviously facing in the opposite direction to them, but I think it might have been some sudden action on a ride. In any case I took advantage of their distraction to take this photo. It is taken with a 50mm lens so I’m standing within three feet of the nearest two who frame the edges of the photo.

Dick: As you say, it is the wonder of still photography that it can capture the most fleeting of moments, like this one. For how long do you think the girl held this dual expression, before the rest of her face came into sync with her eyes? A few hundredths of a second? Certainly not much longer than your 1/125th of a second. And you nailed that moment.

New Zealanders’ kiss.

Re-living your own childhood as in this photo can often happen at the show.

This booth was selling plastic spherical bubbles amongst other things. For the girl, I had the feeling it had been a long day and with night time drawing down more of it still to come.

An impressive stall. A big piece of temporary architecture manned by rows of teddies.

Girls dressed in black navigating through a pavilion.

A moment between rides as they dismount, and a young girl with one thing on her mind. Meanwhile mum is busy on her device and hasn’t noticed.

Scrambling for seats on the chain ride.

A quartet of girls captured by the horses and the light.

The sunlight was fading into twilight as this gent took his ease besides the dodgems.

Dick: I love the mother-daughter dynamic in this one: their physical closeness and similar faces, and their mutual interest in whatever they’re looking at. The daughter’s still at an age when she can show spontaneous and genuine affection for her mum, and the moment you caught them in perfectly shows that.

Barry:  Yes, it was that moment that shows the closeness, the mother daughter bond that can still be expressed naturally like this in public. Up to this moment this is all they have ever known. As you infer this physical closeness will soon pass as the daughter enters her self-conscious teenage years. Perhaps in that sense it is her last year of true childhood. It is a wider theme in a moment of real life.

Fairground revellers hang suspended like marionettes in a still moment before the ride begins.

There was a brief moment where the fantastasical joy of the carousel contrasted with a drama rooted in reality. I knew about the one, but the other remains a mystery.

These student girls from China were lingering around the carousel’s magic twinkling atmosphere like blithe spirits. They were trying to take satisfactory photos of themselves with the ride.