It was one of the rare days when I leave my studio to shoot outdoors. As I mostly do food and stills, I do not need to do outdoor shots that much. But driving through the streets I realized that I could hardly find a house without Christmas decoration. And there were so many of these funny toy Santas climbing up the house. I have never realized this Christmas deco hype in Germany before…
So I went home to get my cam, a Sigma 80-400 OS Lens and tripod ( you never know), found a house with gorgeous decoration and started shooting. As soon as had I arranged my tripod and pulled my huge camera out of my bag, a police car stopped next to me and a policeman got out of the car looking at me very suspiciously:
“What are you doing here? Why are you shooting the house?”
“I am not shooting the house. I am shooting the Santa.”
“Why on earth should anyone want to shoot a toy Santa?”
“I am a photographer, photography is my job and I am currently working on a series about Christmas decoration.”
He did not really understand why I wanted to shoot the Santa, so he decided to raise another topic and talk about photography. He was quizzing me to death, and I decided to be a good girl and answered all his questions (what kind of camera, why this camera, how much was it, why not Nikon, what kind of lens blabla..).
Finally he informed me about the fact that sensor size was not too important and that he was sure that his Nikon was able to produce as good pictures as my camera etc. pp. I hate this kind of pretending tech talk, but I agreed hoping that he would finally leave me alone. He really got into the car and drove away. I saw him shaking his head in the car about the strange woman shooting a Santa.
What a relief, He was gone and I was about to concentrate on my subject again, chose f11, zoomed in when suddenly the door of the house with the Christmas decoration opened and an angry little grandfather appeared. He was very angry and shouted: “Anything wrong with my house?”
That was it for this day; I packed my equipment and left – feeling not in the mood to shoot anymore…
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