On a recent trip to France, I had the opportunity to take my son to Eurodisney for a day. I must confess, as much as I appreciate the movies and stories associated with Disney, I would be a liar if I said that I was looking forward to spend the day in the heat, in an overcrowded place, waiting in endless lines to get on rides which surely would not leave an unforgettable mark in my mind!
But as any loving father who made a promise to his six years old son, I put on my best smile, grabbed my camera and got myself ready to have some fun.
I had intended to take a lot of pictures and surprisingly, I did not ! I mean, I took a lot of pictures of my son but very few of the park itself, it just didn’t “speak” to me! In fact, I did so poorly that when I got home and started to look at some of the shots I took of the park, my first reflex was to erase most of them. I found the pictures dull and boring, pictures I knew I would never look at again. I guess as a photographer, in order to be excited about a picture, you have to be excited about the subject you shoot, and this wasn’t it.
It’s not so much that the pictures were bad, but they were just plain, ordinary. It felt like I had seen those a hundred times before, so I started to wonder if there was anything I could do to make them a little different, more unusual. So I started to play around with it…
and I eventually settled with Black and white. indeed, what could be more apart from Disney than a world without colors, even though Mickey Mouse was first introduced in black and white. I was lucky enough that day that the sky had clouds in it, which became even more dramatic once unsaturated. I’m still not completely thrilled about the pictures but I’m happy with the little twist I gave them.
At the end of the day though, I had a great time with my son and those pictures will always remind me of that first time we ever went there together.
