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Lens-Artists Challenge #349: The First Thing I thought Of …

This week Tina from Travels and Trifles is hosting the Challenge, and her theme is, ‘The First Thing I thought Of …‘. ‘This week I thought perhaps some humor might … be in order, says Tina. ‘Sometimes our sense of humor kicks in before we press the shutter button, other times a perfectly serious image can be made humorous after the fact’. Humour? In my photography? That’s a tall order, I thought.

I hardly ever photograph people, or animals, from which a lot of humour is derived, and instead I take fun from making images deliberately ‘wrong’, either by using a camera that produces an image that is outwith the normal ideas of what a photo should be, or just taking a perfectly good digital image and corrupting the data in some way. But then I got thinking about what I was doing just over a decade ago, when I was learning about photo editors and whatnot, and also some of the situations I came across when we first came to Portugal. And suddenly, I found that I had a few images that might be perfect for this week’s Challenge.

This first image is from a day out in Aveiro. At the time, some workers from the local council were doing some maintenance on the walls of the canal, and their idea of health and safety was unusual, to say the least.

Another thing that struck me as unusual was some people’s propensity to take a short cut to the train. 

Another thing that we used to do quite often, until I fell down a hole, after which my Better Half flat out refused to go again in case I repeated this misfortune, was go the the annual hill climb in Caramulo. Cars and motorcycles would race up a hill, and the fastest driver to complete the time trial was the winner. Sometimes the motorbikes didn’t behave themselves.

Several years ago, the village of Oiã was awarded the status of Town, and we were honoured to have the then President of Portugal, Cavaco Silva, come to the town to officiate the ceremony and unveil a plaque. Back in those days, the security didn’t really stop the people from approaching the President, so grabbing some real close-up images of the President wasn’t a problem. Of course, not everyone treated the ceremony with the reverence that it deserved.

‘Back in the day’, I spent a fair bit of time trying how to use PhotoShop, and here are some of my attempts at multiple exposures. I really enjoyed doing these, and it reminded me of long-forgotten skills. I’m not sure if I could do this today.

The final image in this post, and the featured image, was taken at the annual Tall Boats festival in Ilhavo, near Aveiro. The brass band had just finished playing and were marching from the parade ground when the last musician just turned around and looked back. Fortunately, I was just taking a photo of the row of uniformed musicians as they passed by.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can po3st their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here, and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag ‘Lens-Artists’.

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