I love to travel but I seem to be more prone to "arrival" jet lag than a lot of people. Even in my 20's I would arrive in an exciting city with one desire... find a hotel room and crash. Hard.
But if you do that your sleep pattern gets all screwed up and you wake up in the middle of the evening hungry and circadianly confused. It never worked well for me.
Now, when I travel, I make a point to dump my luggage at whatever hotel I've booked, grab my camera and a wad of cash, and head out the door to walk through my destination city and take photographs. I allow myself to sink into the flow of the streets like an old man lowering himself into a hot bath.
This image (above) was taken on one of my trips to Paris. I was traveling alone (yes, it is possible to take a shooting vacation solo, even if one is married, and I highly recommend doing so for photographers...) and hit Paris on a warm, Fall day. I was photographing at the time with Canon EOS film cameras (EOS 1n) and I was dragging along an 85mm f1.2, a 20-35mm f2.8 and a 50mm f1.4. All the cameras were loaded with Agfa film of one sort or another. My preference then was for the ISO 100 Agfapan APX but I also carried around rolls of ISO 400 as well. In a second camera body I was shooting Agfacolor Portrait film, a nice, ISO 160 film with a long tonal range and graced with the smoothest of gradients.
As I walked along one of the parks I passed by a large fountain and was amused to find people sleeping on the ground around it. In Texas one rarely sleeps on the ground for fear of ticks, scorpions, fleas and other critters. But Parisians are brave and hearty and omni-nap-ready.
I snapped a few frames and moved on but later something about the image sitting on one of hundreds of contact sheets from the trip caught my attention and I printed it large (16x20) to see why I was interested. I haven't gotten to any sort of final understanding but I"m still interested in the image. I recently put it up on the wall. Maybe it's just that it reminds me of how good it feels to take naps.
The shooting vacation was successful, did not impact my marriage, and helped me retain a certain wonderment and attraction to the process of making photographs. A "booster shot" as it were...
3 comments:
Looks like that person is totally jetlagged! If you had followed her/his/its example you would have missed the shot. :-)
Maybe it's the stillness of the girl contrasting with the movement of the water?
I had a part-time musician friend growing up who said he could only play well at the end of the day when he was mentally tired and couldn't think anymore, so he pretty much had to stop thinking and that improved his playing. He said that alcohol and drugs could also produce similar results but with unwanted side effects. Throughout my careers in software development and later scientific copy-editing I always felt that I was pathetically unproductive in the afternoons. Maybe I should have been taking photos instead.
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