Need a LF photo of one of those water parks

[chris jordan]

Hi guys, greetings and happy summer to all. I'm writing with a request: does anyone have a good LF color photo of one of those awful water parks, jammed with people on a sunny day? There are some awesome shots on the internet-- do a Google search for "Chinese water park" and some incredible images come up. But they are all very low-res and I'd like something higher quality.

I want to use the image in a huge digital mosaic to be made out a few million plastic straws. The number of plastic straws will be equal to the number of people who die yearly from illnesses caused by lack of access to safe drinking water. Up close, you will see lots of tiny drink straws, and standing back at a distance, the image will look like a picture of a water park with slides, wave pool, etc. The idea is to juxtapose the five million people around the world who die from lack of water every year, against the other millions of people around the world who participate in extravagant and wasteful water consumption.

I could go to our local "Wild Waves" park and shoot something myself, but all I need is a pretty generic wide-angle photo of a water park, so I might use a stock image also. Before I do either of those things I thought I might check in here. Does anyone have one they might want to license for a crazy huge piece?

Cheers from Seattle,

~cj

www.chrisjordan.com

[Kirk Gittings]

Long time no see. Hope things continue to do well for you. were you on Rachel ray? How is it in the land of the famous?

[chris jordan]

Hi Kirk, thanks for checking in. Thanks for taking on the moderator gig. Things here are crazy! Having a huge audience for my work come with a host of its own problems, but overall I wouldn't trade it in.

For other who might see this thread, forget the water park; I need a different picture: a classic color shot of a home swimming pool, filled with water but with no one in it. Ideally it would be one of those kidney-shaped pools, bright colors, and LF. Please let me know if you have anything like that.

best,

~cj

[QT Luong]

I guess that's not really an usual LF subject for most photographers on this forum. How about asking Massimo Vitali ? He has in stock a lot of swimming pools images shot with a big camera.

[QT Luong]

The number of plastic straws will be equal to the number of people who die yearly from illnesses caused by lack of access to safe drinking water. Up close, you will see lots of tiny drink straws,

Since you are here, one question I was always curious about "running the numbers":

When you write for example "Depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006", is the 32,000 the exact number of Barbies in the image or is it approximate ? If it is exact, how do you make sure the count is correct ?

[J. Gilbert Plantinga]

This probably won't do, but it IS a water park...
http://www.gilplant.com/portfolio/index.html

[chris jordan]

Hi QT, nice idea to talk to Massimo. I'll try that.

The numbers in my RTN images are very close to the correct numbers, but it's impossible to get it perfectly accurate. For example, with the Barbies image, each florette of Barbies contains 22 Barbies. To depict 32,000 Barbies I had to make an image out of 1455 of the florettes. But the florettes overlap on each other, and in that process some of the Barbies got hidden.

The print also gets slightly cropped when they cut off 1/8" at the edge during mounting, so a few more Barbies get eliminated that way. So the number is close to the correct number, within a percent or two I think.

The pieces that are assembled in a grid (the Seurat, and the Skull with Cigarette, and the Denali image) are easier to count, but they also have the problem of losing a few at the edges during mounting. Otherwise those ones are extremely close to the exact number.

Some of them are more tricky, such as the Paper Bags image that looks like a forest. Many of the bags are hidden behind other bags, but I counted them all as part of the number. So there are some distant tree shapes with thousands of bags in them, that are mostly hidden behind other trees, but I counted all of the bags in each tree, including the hidden ones. Same thing with the plastic cups image.

With the Plastic Bottles, half of the two million bottles are in the top two inches of the print, because of the way the perspective works. The bottles are so small at that point that they aren't individually visible, so you couldn't count them even if you wanted to. But that picture does contain very close to two million bottles.

Okay that's it for now-- back to the huge pile of plastic drinking straws that I'm wading around in today!

Cheers,

~cj

[chris jordan]

Hey Gilbert, that's some really nice work on your website. I hope you're putting it out there in the world-- juried shows, portfolio review events, etc.

[David Hedley]

Chris - very interesting photographs! Are you familiar with the work of Andreas Gursky? I went to an exhibition of his photographs a few months back, which was stunning, and not dissimilar in approach to yours.