Off-balance

Know what this blog has been lacking in for the past few months? Pictures by me. Know why? Because Mr. Hard Disk who lived in my computer decided to make friends with Ms. Defect, never considering his responsibilities to protect the pictures Dame Hard Drive carried. Their loss presented a critical blow to the posting of my pictures to Spice of Life, that is until I remembered I had posted all my decent shots to Facebook and could just pull them from there to post here. Hurray for that.

I am fond of this picture, less for the aesthetic properties, which I have attempted to draw out in most of my other pictures, than the message I was trying, and feel I succeeded, to communicate. The young skateboarder is a little out-of-focus and his position and the angle may not be the most dynamic, but perfecting these was not so interesting to me as the theme of this picture. What attracted me to him, his friend and his father as subjects were just how ridiculously out-of-place they looked at this skatepark, these suburbanites spending an afternoon at a park where chain-smokers next to their beater cars at the opposite end appear to be dealing drugs.

Obviously, the kid is not the most comfortable on his skateboard. A far sight better than his off-camera friend, the subject is still struggling to maintain his balance in simple forward motion, no tricks yet. His father, also off-camera but included in another picture I plan on posting, is sitting next to his shiny white convertible Beetle. Never thought of the Abercrombie & Fitch crowd as one interested in graffiti either. The chance of getting paint all over your too-expensive T-shirt cannot be appealing. For me, his off-balance stance is simply the physical representation how disconcerting this all must be.