Saturday, August 11, 2012

What Balloons Do When No One's Watching

When I was about 8 or 9 (early 70s) I seemingly out of nowhere began to suffer from severe headaches and hallucinations. I remember being taken to Dr. Wilcox ( a gruff old bugger typical of GPs of the time) whose best guess was migraines (keeping in mind that it's all a bit hazy for me now). What he could not explain was the hallucinations. I would spend night after night terrified, screaming and crying.

One of the things that terrified me was the feeling (hallucination) of being tiny in an incredibly huge warehouse/train station. I wan't tiny in a normal warehouse; I was normal size in an incredibly oversized space and the feeling was literally overwhelming.

Sunday, August 05, 2012

One Day Down at the Implosion

What do you do, when you are at an "event" to take photos, and realise that every second person has a camera and the "event" will probably be one of the most photographed events in your city since it fell down on its own?

You lose a little bit of interest and start thinking outside the square.

I read a thing on the Internet (so it must be true) recently about how now that there are so many cameras around, a lot of people have started missing big events. Specifically, it was about weddings, and the reason many people were "missing" the event was because they were too busy checking their camera screen, settings, etc and the event passed them by. Sure they were there, and they had some photos of it for posterity (hopefully). But they couldn't actually remember much of the specifics of the ceremony. They were to busy recording it and waiting for that one special moment to take a photo of.

So I wondered how many people this morning missed seeing the event with their own eyes because they were watching it on the LCD screen of their camera/iPhone/video recorder.

I'm one of them. I didn't "see" the building come down with my own eyes. I watched it in my LCD screen. And, of course, it was over in less than ten seconds and all that was left was the memory of it on my SD card and in my ears. So I got to taking some sneaky photos of as many cameras that were around me as I could, being a bit bored and knowing that every man and his dog would have photos of the actual implosion as good as or better than mine.

It intrigues me how technology has changed the way we do things. There were photos and video of the implosion on Facebook before I got back to my car. Admittedly I hung around a bit (taking photos of people taking photos), but still. Within ten minutes the whole event was online and going global.

So, in light of there being a million photos of this mornings implosion out there somewhere, I am proud to present my mornings work. I call it:

Photos of people taking photos moments after the Implosion.


I'd like to think this was a unique idea, but I just saw on Facebook a photo of a camera taking a photo of the implosion, so pretty much I should have just stayed in bed this morning.


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