Given the good number of story posts I’ve seen, a bunch of you were at the #StateFair yesterday like us.
This is probably my fourth or fifth time at the Puyallup fair, so it pretty much qualifies as a family tradition now. Christine was reflecting on how stepping onto the fair grounds is like stepping into childhood for so many, as very little changes every year. I like it. It’s goofy and fun and I’ll come again.
One thing we did this year that was new for me was to watch a hypnotism show. When the hypnotist asked who here is skeptical or doesn’t think hypno is real, I took a beat then shot my arm straight up – I really don’t, but I was curious.
I still really don’t though, maybe even more so than before. I just can’t wrap my head around how it could possibly work… These people were conking out within barely a minute of pretty basic guided meditation. Is the human mind that malleable? Maybe. I just think that if it were THAT easy, it would be weaponized and used in every police force and military. So yeah. Still had a few laughs though.
Fairgrounds are these liminal spaces where the rules sort of shift out of phase just a little bit in that classical sense of “festival” or bacchanalia, which lends itself to the camera quite well. This is where I first tried out my Holga and where I planned to try out some expired Polaroid from the 70s before realizing that the cartridge I’d already loaded wasn’t empty yet.
The day we were there, I saw one photographer with at least two chunky cameras hanging off her shoulder and a bag that could have contained more things, making me feel a little less weird about being there with two lenses.
One thing I did want to try more intentionally this time around was comparing RAW with very starkly processed JPEGs, so I could see the difference a little more. That’s what I’m posting here: slide 1 is RAW, slide 2 is the in-camera processed JPEG with a Wes Anderson inspired recipe by Fuji X Weekly. See also: x