A Fair

My interest in photography leans very heavily toward landscapes. When I think about grabbing a camera and going somewhere to shoot, I’m thinking about landscapes. Shooting people or events rarely filters through my consciousness and as an event photographer, I’m probably an almost-adequate landscape photographer. Despite my shortcomings in that arena, people continue to ask me to shoot events. On request, I’ve shot parties, parades, baseball and football games, and weddings, among other events. Yesterday’s event was an Easter Fair for a local church. I walked through the fair for an hour and a half, covering the entertainments,  the various “booths”, the crowd, and local politicians. The payoff for me was the kids. Children are often good subjects when they don’t know they’re being photographed, and the fair was crowded enough that they weren’t paying much attention to me.

Snaked Again

At the end of the hike mentioned in the previous post, In The Canyon, as I walked the last two hundred yards to the parking area, this snake began crossing the trail. I stopped, got down on one knee and framed through the viewfinder to capture the image. The snake had paused as I stopped, as if it was profiling for the photograph.
The Nikon autofocus was hunting for the main subject, so I switched to manual focus and took a few frames. I had seen a couple in their twenties behind me on the trail. They walked up behind me, then stopped abruptly as the woman said, "Oh!"
"There are no rattles, so it probably isn't poisonous." I said. "Looks like it might be a gopher snake. My granddaughter could tell us immediately what it is."
I took a couple more frames of the snake. "It isn't coiled to strike.", I said and stepped around it by the edge of the trail.
The couple hesitated, then walked a large u-shaped detour through the thick undergrowth of the adjoining hillside where there were considerably more likely to be snakes than around the trail. I didn't mention that probability to them. They seemed nervous.