Fair Play — making multiple exposures at the State Fair of Texas

Big Tex and lots of Little Texes

 

I covered my first State Fair of Texas shortly after I was hired by The Dallas Morning News in mid-2007. From that moment on, it became easily one of my favorite annual assignments.

I take a macro view of the fair. For me, it is the sum of many parts — three weeks of colors and shapes, sounds and textures, that weave together a vibrant tableau.

My goal this year was the try and marry some of those disparate ideas into little cosmoses of my own design. These images were created through multiple exposures done in camera.

Balloons and bouncing hair

Two fingers and three shadows

Thanks to advances in technology, today’s digital single lens reflex cameras can now do something that older, analog ones did with ease — allow the user to make exposures on top of exposures, ad infinitum.

We are a Canon shop here at TDMN, and for this essay I used a combination of the 5d Mark III and 1D-X, both of which have multiple exposure modes. There are a LOT of settings you can use in that mode, but I stuck to a simple one that basically just layered one frame on to another.

Again, this is a lot more like doing multiple exposures with a film camera, where you would just not advance the frame and keep making exposures on the same piece of film. The trick is to balance your exposures — high contrast against low contrast, light against dark.

Cowboy hat and corn

Top O' Texas Tower

Full disclosure that my success-to-failure rate was crazy high, with a lot more wasted frames than useable ones. If I’m grateful for anything with the project, it’s for the people I photographed, who were patient with me whenever I came back and said something like, “Hey, that thing I tried a while ago doesn’t appear to have worked out too well. Mind if I stick around some more and make a few more images?”

More full disclosure that I had planned to make several trips out to the Fair over its three week run and produce a larger body of work, but life got in the way, as did work; it’s not every day that we have a major, international news story localize itself in our town (read: Ebola).

The Midway

Candy apple and Ferris wheel

I am mostly pleased with how this turned out. There were a few ideas I was never able to completely visualize (produce) the way I saw them in my head — corn dog shot, something at the Livestock Pavilion — but for the amount of time I ended up having to work on this (about three days), I think it turned out ok.

Because I’m an experience driven person, though, I’ll chalk this one up to time well spent, because I had a lot of fun working on it, got a much better feel for how to use this part of the camera, and got to play with that creative side of my brain a bit.

I hope you all enjoy these. Thanks for your time.

Lone Star Boulevard.

- gerry -

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