IMAGINING IMAGES

 Entertainment, the circus, photography – they all have one major thing in common. They are all unreal. Make-believe. Fancy flights of imagination on tight ropes and tricky trapezes. It's nothing more than escapism. And the fix only lasts as long as you look at it.

Imagination is, however, a gift from God – tiny, momentary sneak peeks into eternity. The spirit realm bent towards light or dark, and sometimes stuck somewhere in the confusion of a muddy-grey. Imagination has the power to call to life. To give hope. To inspire. So for inspiration-sake we bend our imaginations toward light and use the light to create imaginings.

 As a photographer I'm in the fortunate position to have a bevy of beauties in the family – so models are in no short-supply. Always up for playing make-believe and fooling around with props – model, friend and cousin, Nadja – was immediately on board with the idea of doing a circus-shoot while the Brian Boswell Circus was in town.

 

As a qualified and trained journalist I had wonderful images in my head of National Geographic-style behind-the-scenes shots with the motley crew that constitutes a circus staff complement. Not so easy. They might be a motley crew but they're a business first and foremost and have all the red bureaucratic tape to go with it. It took several visits and phone calls to get the go-ahead to do a shoot on the premises, and I was assured that behind-the-scenes shots were out of the question from a practical and logistical point of view. National Geographic die-hard photographers actually live with their subjects for a couple of months to get those gut-wrenching black&whites. We only had a couple of hours to pull a rabbit out of the hat.

A motley crew ourselves – Nadja, myself and our moms (aka sister assistants), arrived on the circus's last Thursday afternoon with a Nikon D60, a hired lens, reflector, and two or three outfits. I decided to use the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 lens for the occasion – an unorthodox choice for portraiture and fashion, but then again, the circus is an unorthodox environment.

Photographer, Ken Rockwell, describes it well in his article ‘How to use ultra-wide lenses’: “Painting is an art of inclusion. Photography is an art of exclusion – everything gets into your photo unless you go out of your way to exclude it. Ultra-wides get everything in, whether we want them to or not.” However, ultra-wides are for getting close and bringing the viewer into the photo, not for fitting a subject into a photo, says Ken - ultrawides are not for the faint of heart. "Ultrawides are for putting next to the muzzle of Dirty Harry's revolver to put it in your face. If you can't or won't get close, leave the ultrawide at home. Ultrawides rub the viewers nose in your subject. Properly used, ultrawides grab your viewer and yank him into the middle of your situation."

The fact that a DX-format camera crops a 14mm to an equivalent of 21mm on FX or 35mm film formats, coupled with my limited experience with wide angles, saw to it that the lens’s prowess pretty much went under-cover. Still, I’m set on conquering the tricky trapeze – and letting imagination fly higher and wider...