magic_fella
Hunting Werewolves
Sheree and I went hunting zombies last night, and wound up finding a werewolf.
It started yesterday morning.
“Want to go shoot some zombies tonight?” asked my wife cheerfully.
“Sure,” I replied. “You take the Browning and I’ll take the Beretta. But remember to aim for the head because those suckers never die unless you shoot them right in the brain. Sure: they’ll fall down. But that’s just to fool the zombie slaying newbies. As soon as you turn your back, they start to move. And by then you’ve put your gun down and are forced to defend yourself with, like, a pool noodle or a garden trowel or something.”
Sheree looked at me with tired eyes.
“I meant ‘shoot them’ with a camera,” she said.
“…ah,” I quipped cleverly in reply. “Well…I guess that’ll be alright too.”
Sheree had found an Internet site announcing that a group of people were going to make themselves up like zombies and create an undead procession through a south side bus terminal. And that is how we came to be sitting in the Dodge Magnum, staking out a bus terminal on Halloween night, as autumn darkness pooled around us.
“Wouldn’t it be a cool story if a couple of photographers went out to photograph zombies on Halloween night…and if they think the zombies are just gonna be people dressed up, but the zombies are real ACTUAL zombies…and they get their brains eaten?” I asked my wife, more or less to entertain myself as we passed the time.
“Only in your world, dear,” she said, half listening. (In her defence, Sheree may have been texting one of her 6,432 friends…and, let’s be honest: most of the things I say require only half attention anyway.)
“And how about if the husband was sitting in the car telling his wife a story about a couple of photographers waiting to photograph a zombie walk only the zombies turn out to be real and even though the husband has already talked about the idea, the wife has paid no attention to it…at all…and they have to defend themselves using only their cameras because the short-sighted wife made the husband leave his guns at home?”
“…what?” asked Sheree, looking up – face bathed in the soft glow from her Blackberry. Her eyes were all squinty, which is exactly what happens when she is trying to figure out what the hell I just said.
I cock my eyebrows enigmatically and try to sound like Boris Karloff. “Never mind.”
She sighs and, as I continue to tell myself stories about brain eating zombies, I realize my wife has dozed off. I keep my eyes peeled for the undead: brain-eating or otherwise.
Nope. No zombies. Time passes. Still no zombies, just soft regular breathing from my wife next to me. “Some zombie hunter she turned out to be,” I sniff to myself. “Good thing one of us is awake. We could wake up tomorrow with our brains all eaten.”
I continue looking hopefully out the window when a skinny kid, maybe sixteen or so, lumbers by with a couple of friends. He sees me in the car and nods. I nod back. Then, for no reason at all, he gives me the finger. He’s jabbing it sharply into the air and his face contorts into something that is not even remotely socially acceptable.
…huh?
I sit there for a moment, wondering what a middle aged guy, sitting in a car waiting patiently for zombies to show up, could possibly have done to get this kid to flip him the bird.
Briefly, very briefly, I consider stepping out of the car, breaking the offending digit off and feeding it to him. Not that I would do it, of course…probably.
To make a long story just a little less long (particularly since I seem to insist on writing all this shit on a photography site) Sheree and I didn’t actually see any zombies. (You just can’t count on brain eaters to be punctual, I guess.)
We wound up at Edmonton’s Halloween Alley – a neighbourhood that celebrates the night in style. We had a blast…it was a photographer’s dream.
One of the houses had crafted a “tunnel of terror.”
“Enter our Tunnel of Terror,” growls the distorted voice from a ghetto blaster hidden under a tarp. “You may enter…but you will only go in once…because no one ever leaves. Bwaaaahaaahaaa!!!”
This sounded like either really shrewd marketing or a lose/lose proposition for me. Besides, I've just seen plenty of people leaving...usually they're giggling or slapping each other on the back in that people have when, together, they've stared into the Abyss and survived. I decide it's just marketing, shed any trace of good decision making, and enter the Tunnel of Terror.
Sheree and I have designed Haunted Houses for clients, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect. There were creepy (and may I add ‘inexplicable’) sounds of chains being dragged and a significantly constipated mammal somewhere in the distance moaning hopelessly as they sought relief.
A wall of masks was along one dark wall – and I just KNEW one of them was going to move. Sure enough, it did – and something actually grabbed my arm…which is a mega no-no in haunted houses because the arm grabber usually gets punched out by the panicked grabee. I decided to let him live and moved around a darkened corner.
That’s where I saw the werewolf just ahead of me, waiting impatiently in the fog.
In an instant I was thinking about crap. I was transported back to the zombie-mobile. I wondered what would happen if a skinny sixteen year old kid flipped the bird to a middle aged guy sitting in a car out front of, say, a bus station.
And what if the middle aged guy was actually a REAL werewolf…and what if that werewolf, freed from every last vestige of political correctness, decided to remind that sixteen year old pile of slug snot that there IS a pecking order and respect should be shown to those who are bigger and older than himself? Would that necessarily be a BAD thing? Hmmm…
Anyway, I stepped forward and pretended that the werewolf waiting in the fog actually surprised me. (After all, these guys had put a LOT of work into their “tunnel of terror.”)
I shot a number of images of the werewolf. He was quite obliging about posing.
But I liked this one the best.
It seems to me that a werewolf ought to be something you hardly see. When you look again, it’s gone and you didn’t get a REAL good look anyway.The image should be grainy. It took me longer to Photoshop this shot than most of the stuff I do.
The close ups looked like a guy in a costume. But from a distance with added grain and blur and shake? The result is the exact kind of image I wanted to create. This one.
Others may see it in a thumbnail and sniff “This guy is wasting MY valuable flickr time! Doesn’t he know I have only twelve more comments to make before I can post MY shot in ‘Pictures-That-Really-Are-The-Best-Anywhere-On-The-Planet-And-This-Includes-Anything-You (And-Yes-I-DO-Mean-YOU) Will-EVER-Take-,-Which-Makes-It-The-Most-Exclusive-Group-In-All-Of-flickerdom-Of-Which-I-Am-A-Member-And-You-Aren’t Group (P1-A125/Sweeper Running/No Awards = Death By Slow Strangulation AND Getting Banned For LIFE Also/Demigod Invite Only)’?”
Ah well. I think, for my part, that any shot of a werewolf taken on any given Halloween night should be presented like it’s been taken in a hurry by someone genuinely afraid of getting eviscerated. And the viewer should be left thinking that it’s probably just a guy in a costume.
…or maybe not…
Happy Halloween from Larry...and me.
Hunting Werewolves
Sheree and I went hunting zombies last night, and wound up finding a werewolf.
It started yesterday morning.
“Want to go shoot some zombies tonight?” asked my wife cheerfully.
“Sure,” I replied. “You take the Browning and I’ll take the Beretta. But remember to aim for the head because those suckers never die unless you shoot them right in the brain. Sure: they’ll fall down. But that’s just to fool the zombie slaying newbies. As soon as you turn your back, they start to move. And by then you’ve put your gun down and are forced to defend yourself with, like, a pool noodle or a garden trowel or something.”
Sheree looked at me with tired eyes.
“I meant ‘shoot them’ with a camera,” she said.
“…ah,” I quipped cleverly in reply. “Well…I guess that’ll be alright too.”
Sheree had found an Internet site announcing that a group of people were going to make themselves up like zombies and create an undead procession through a south side bus terminal. And that is how we came to be sitting in the Dodge Magnum, staking out a bus terminal on Halloween night, as autumn darkness pooled around us.
“Wouldn’t it be a cool story if a couple of photographers went out to photograph zombies on Halloween night…and if they think the zombies are just gonna be people dressed up, but the zombies are real ACTUAL zombies…and they get their brains eaten?” I asked my wife, more or less to entertain myself as we passed the time.
“Only in your world, dear,” she said, half listening. (In her defence, Sheree may have been texting one of her 6,432 friends…and, let’s be honest: most of the things I say require only half attention anyway.)
“And how about if the husband was sitting in the car telling his wife a story about a couple of photographers waiting to photograph a zombie walk only the zombies turn out to be real and even though the husband has already talked about the idea, the wife has paid no attention to it…at all…and they have to defend themselves using only their cameras because the short-sighted wife made the husband leave his guns at home?”
“…what?” asked Sheree, looking up – face bathed in the soft glow from her Blackberry. Her eyes were all squinty, which is exactly what happens when she is trying to figure out what the hell I just said.
I cock my eyebrows enigmatically and try to sound like Boris Karloff. “Never mind.”
She sighs and, as I continue to tell myself stories about brain eating zombies, I realize my wife has dozed off. I keep my eyes peeled for the undead: brain-eating or otherwise.
Nope. No zombies. Time passes. Still no zombies, just soft regular breathing from my wife next to me. “Some zombie hunter she turned out to be,” I sniff to myself. “Good thing one of us is awake. We could wake up tomorrow with our brains all eaten.”
I continue looking hopefully out the window when a skinny kid, maybe sixteen or so, lumbers by with a couple of friends. He sees me in the car and nods. I nod back. Then, for no reason at all, he gives me the finger. He’s jabbing it sharply into the air and his face contorts into something that is not even remotely socially acceptable.
…huh?
I sit there for a moment, wondering what a middle aged guy, sitting in a car waiting patiently for zombies to show up, could possibly have done to get this kid to flip him the bird.
Briefly, very briefly, I consider stepping out of the car, breaking the offending digit off and feeding it to him. Not that I would do it, of course…probably.
To make a long story just a little less long (particularly since I seem to insist on writing all this shit on a photography site) Sheree and I didn’t actually see any zombies. (You just can’t count on brain eaters to be punctual, I guess.)
We wound up at Edmonton’s Halloween Alley – a neighbourhood that celebrates the night in style. We had a blast…it was a photographer’s dream.
One of the houses had crafted a “tunnel of terror.”
“Enter our Tunnel of Terror,” growls the distorted voice from a ghetto blaster hidden under a tarp. “You may enter…but you will only go in once…because no one ever leaves. Bwaaaahaaahaaa!!!”
This sounded like either really shrewd marketing or a lose/lose proposition for me. Besides, I've just seen plenty of people leaving...usually they're giggling or slapping each other on the back in that people have when, together, they've stared into the Abyss and survived. I decide it's just marketing, shed any trace of good decision making, and enter the Tunnel of Terror.
Sheree and I have designed Haunted Houses for clients, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect. There were creepy (and may I add ‘inexplicable’) sounds of chains being dragged and a significantly constipated mammal somewhere in the distance moaning hopelessly as they sought relief.
A wall of masks was along one dark wall – and I just KNEW one of them was going to move. Sure enough, it did – and something actually grabbed my arm…which is a mega no-no in haunted houses because the arm grabber usually gets punched out by the panicked grabee. I decided to let him live and moved around a darkened corner.
That’s where I saw the werewolf just ahead of me, waiting impatiently in the fog.
In an instant I was thinking about crap. I was transported back to the zombie-mobile. I wondered what would happen if a skinny sixteen year old kid flipped the bird to a middle aged guy sitting in a car out front of, say, a bus station.
And what if the middle aged guy was actually a REAL werewolf…and what if that werewolf, freed from every last vestige of political correctness, decided to remind that sixteen year old pile of slug snot that there IS a pecking order and respect should be shown to those who are bigger and older than himself? Would that necessarily be a BAD thing? Hmmm…
Anyway, I stepped forward and pretended that the werewolf waiting in the fog actually surprised me. (After all, these guys had put a LOT of work into their “tunnel of terror.”)
I shot a number of images of the werewolf. He was quite obliging about posing.
But I liked this one the best.
It seems to me that a werewolf ought to be something you hardly see. When you look again, it’s gone and you didn’t get a REAL good look anyway.The image should be grainy. It took me longer to Photoshop this shot than most of the stuff I do.
The close ups looked like a guy in a costume. But from a distance with added grain and blur and shake? The result is the exact kind of image I wanted to create. This one.
Others may see it in a thumbnail and sniff “This guy is wasting MY valuable flickr time! Doesn’t he know I have only twelve more comments to make before I can post MY shot in ‘Pictures-That-Really-Are-The-Best-Anywhere-On-The-Planet-And-This-Includes-Anything-You (And-Yes-I-DO-Mean-YOU) Will-EVER-Take-,-Which-Makes-It-The-Most-Exclusive-Group-In-All-Of-flickerdom-Of-Which-I-Am-A-Member-And-You-Aren’t Group (P1-A125/Sweeper Running/No Awards = Death By Slow Strangulation AND Getting Banned For LIFE Also/Demigod Invite Only)’?”
Ah well. I think, for my part, that any shot of a werewolf taken on any given Halloween night should be presented like it’s been taken in a hurry by someone genuinely afraid of getting eviscerated. And the viewer should be left thinking that it’s probably just a guy in a costume.
…or maybe not…
Happy Halloween from Larry...and me.