The Eye Of A Clown

This one’s pretty recent and it’s an example of being dedicated to what you have to do to capture to image. I lug around a camera that weighs a lot, and some days you’re in the mood to shoot and some days you’re not, but you know that if you don’t have it and it happens in front of you, you’re just disgusted with yourself. So you have to inconvenience yourself enough to carry something that weighs over five pounds and have to babysit it while you’re ordering dinner.

This is me getting out on the path, the yellow brick road, and looking for it. We were in Perth, Australia and this was the time trials for a huge airplane tournament. These plans fly down to the water and go in between cones and it’s really a prestigious event. I happened to be there the day they were doing this, and I happened to be out there with my camera the moment this guy was doing this thing.

If you see the big cloud of smoke up top, he had actually been vertical, facing straight up in the air and was at a dead standstill for probably 10 seconds. But then he suddenly turned over and started coming down. I felt like I was capturing the Space Shuttle crashing. And he was just up there having fun. But that’s what’s so beautiful about art. With no explanation you could think this did not work out correctly.

I remember it was windy and we were walking and walking and we could hear them from our hotel, but here I am in the right place at the right time with the right lens. That’s why to me, this is one of my favorite shots, because we, as photographers, always look for the circumstance and I believe I caught something that I saw. Whether people like it or not, that’s never ever the question or the answer. I don’t care. It’s what I’m trying to learn and do that’s important. And when I look at this I feel that I was there and the heartbeat was going and I succeeded in capturing what I wanted to shoot.