This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 9:19 AM and is filed under Humor, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Well, the other night a very lovely friend of mine and her youngest son, all of 7 years old, went downtown to take some photos at night. I was using a strobe on a tripod, the hot shoe flash on my camera, and the 7 year old was holding a LED flashlight helping me get a focal point on mom’s face. Needless to say, in this night scene, there were strobes going off and a flashlight flying around the brick walls.
About 10 minutes into the shoot we were approached by a security guard from the local county jail. He walked up to me and asked me if he could help me… Now, picture this: I’m holding a camera around my neck with a hefty flash sitting atop the camera, there’s a young man next to me holding a flash light shining it at a woman standing next to a brick wall with a flash mounted on a tripod behind her… I simply told him we were taking some photos.
To his offer of assistance, I wanted to reply with “Yeah, you can hold your flashlight on her face so I’ll have even more light to focus with”, but I didn’t. He then asked what we were doing… Again, remember the scene I painted in the paragraph above. I told him we were just out taking some shots with the strobes. He asked me “why?!” I simply said “just for fun…” He asked me a series of other questions and said he had to check it out because they wanted to make sure we weren’t trying to break someone out of jail… Now, I’m no jailbreak expert, but I think the equipment I had on hand wasn’t in the correct realm to be breaking someone out of jail… That’s just me… We were a block or so off of the gate surrounding the compound as well so I think if I was going to be breaking someone out, I may need to be closer to the facilities… Plus, I don’t think you bring along beautiful women and 7 year olds for a jail break… That’s just me and my limited comprehension of what it takes to break someone out of jail.
We finally completed our conversation and everything was cool, but I guess in this post 9/11, heightened sense of security society we live in, you must check everything out… I’m glad he did. We weren’t up to no good. We were just trying to have a little fun… I guess we were just a little too close to the “you can’t have fun around here” barrier…
Oh, well. We got some good shots with some interesting light scenes and left un-arrested. All in all, it was a good shoot… I still have a lot to learn about the strobes… placement, angles, shutter speeds, aperture, etc. I’ll get there!
Until next time…
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One Response to “What Are you Doing Down Here?!”
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May 28th, 2008 at 2:51 PM
That’s a great story! I’m with you — what were you doing to indicate “jailbreak”?!
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