Santa Anita Race track

I brought my converted infrared digital camera with me to the Santa Anita Race Track yesterday. It’s a way to challenge myself by shooting in black and white infrared when everything looks so great in color. I go to the track every couple of years. I am not really a gambler but I like betting on long shots. Santa Anita Park is a beautiful place. The track faces the mountains with lots of palm trees dotting the landscape. I’ve photographed the races many times, always in color. Shooting in infrared changes the immaculate scenery into black and white with any live plants looking white. Blue skies can go black. I like this bugler. I photographed him in 2012 in color and recorded his bugling with my digital sound recorder. I combine the audio with stills into a short video clip. There’s a section on my website I call “Sights and Sounds” where you can see and hear the Bugler. This image in color would place his red coat against dark green foliage and brown earth. In infrared he is now placed against a white background. He reminds me of the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland.”

The wonderful fleeting thing in Jeremy’s inspirational photograph is the smoke, from the candle. Without the smoke we only have depicted, a candle and a textured wall. The smoke will eventually go away leaving the candle all by itself. But the smoke was once part of the candle and therefore included in the photograph. My image plays on that same untouchable thing that makes the image and yet will eventually be gone. In my case it is the shadow of the tree. Later in this day the shadow will be gone leaving only the tree and the wall. If the sky was cloudy the shadow would not exist. Only the photograph can collect that moment when elegance comes together and freezes the time in a fraction of a second and holds onto the shadow… or the smoke.