Category: Photography

I love street fairs. Ann Arbor has the Street Art Festival and the Top of the Park, as part of its annual summer festival. It makes the small town livelier and it makes the sweltering summer easier to live through. Too bad I do not have too many photos of my Ann Arbor days. The best I have of the summer festival is this pathetic photo. My old hard drive crashed, bringing down with it four years worth of recorded memories. Photos, writings, all of it.

But there are new memories to be made and Glebe has its own street fair. It is not as big as Ann Arbor but it is just as fun. And I had some chance to practice my photography skill. And these three are my favorite shots.

I like this picture because of the girl and the question of ethics.

I love shooting strangers but as a libertarian, the guilt of invading their privacy haunts me. This guilt has grown ever since I bought a lens capable of zooming up to 200mm. I have decided to address this problem by not posting any of it online.

This particular picture of course is a different story. The performance is part of public affair but it demonstrates something about guilt. The problem with a zoom lens sometimes is that it makes as if the person I am interested in is looking directly at me (which is unlikely here given the distance and the crowd I was in), looking askance. And with a stare like that, one would freeze, forcing one to ask, is this right?

As for the picture itself, the lighting could be better. Maybe I should have come closer to the stage and switched to a lens of greater aperture size.

This is just amusing. It is a common trick to pose like a statue. Painted in the appropriate colors, an unsuspecting visitor would be shocked to see a moving statue.

All I want to say further here is that I like the composure.

This has to be the most entertaining street performance in the whole fair. Witty lyrics. Hilarious strained, old wild wild west American accented voice. Howdy!

I had a good angle here. The lighting was great as well. Five minutes into the shooting, several other photographers sat beside me to shoot the singer-cum-guitarist-cum-harmonicists.