Skatepark

Met up with a local photographer today named Maria and after talking a while, we decided to head downtown and try to find something interesting to photograph. A guy named Donald stopped us as we were walking and asked us about our cameras. Said his father was a staff photographer for the Toledo Blade back in the day. He was very shy, and acted as if it had been a huge step for him just to say hi to us. But as we talked to this friendly stranger I could see glimpses of another, almost manic, individual. I don’t know if he was drunk, but he had that same kind of dried saliva stuff I so often see on drunks when they stop me to talk. It was interesting hearing about his father, but then he started talking about how he hated Mexicans. I remember at that very moment my eyes glazing over and the sounds coming out of his mouth changing from words to incomprehensible noise to my brain. I told him thanks and goodbye, but as we turned around to leave he said to me, “I probably won’t be around much longer, can you take my picture?” So I did. I didn’t think anything of the photos until I looked at them on the computer and I saw that same glimpse of two distinct personalities that didn’t quite seem to mesh with one another.

Shortly after taking Donald’s photo we made it to the skate park. I don’t normally like shooting sports but it was really nice with the overpass providing both shade and some interesting lines to work with. It also didn’t hurt that there were some extremely talented bikers like Noah Lochner pulling off some insane stunts when we showed up. Having somebody upside down in the air staring down at the concrete made for interesting photos but at the same time it made me extremely nervous. Although I wasn’t actively encouraging any of them to jump higher, simply by being there with my camera they were playing it up a bit. I was worried that if one of them got hurt I would have been at least partly responsible just for being there. Thankfully that did not happen today.