Evergreen State Fair

I had the opportunity to be hired as a photographer for the Evergreen State Fair in Monroe, Washington in August.  It was an amazing opportunity to shoot everything fair related.  I had so much fun capturing moments of the fair. I was able to shoot the concerts, the meet and greets for the bands, the rodeo, the monster trucks (I've never seen monster trucks before and sure wish that I would have had some earplugs.), the performers, the animals, 4-H, the carnival and anything else I could find.  I was all over the fairgrounds and I should have been wearing a pedometer.  I know it was several miles every day and sometimes it was hard because I was suppose to be in 2 places at the same time.  As I've been looking through my pictures trying to decide which ones I want to share, I've realized that I have several so I'm going to break it into multiple entries.  The first ones are one of the crowd favorites, the pig races.

The racers are getting ready to go.

An eager competitor geared up and ready to go.

 

And they are off.

And out of the gate.

Stay out of their way

They are neck and neck

Not to be left behind.

Heading for the finish line

The final hurdle before the finish line

An individual challenge for this pig.  The challenge was to go over the high hurdle, but he much preferred going through it.

The final leg

The reward for their hard fought race

Lucille Dickson McCrohan

Many times in life, you never know what you're able to do until you try. We often expect perfection from ourselves the very first time we try something.  Little children fall many times when they are learning to walk, but to be successful they have to keep getting up.  Learning to play a new musical instrument can be a source of frustration, and even tears.  Often the first few notes might not sound like you hope for and it's easy to stop and walk away.  We normally don't learn something by just saying "I want to learn to..."  So it is with photo restoration.  You look at a photo and envision what it should look like once it's finished, but getting there is the challenge.  Often it takes trying different tools or looking at the photo with different perspectives to bring the vision to life.  This one took looking at it in many different ways before the mental vision matched the picture.  This is the great, great grandma of a dear friend and I'm sure she lead an amazing life.  She had to be a woman full of dignity, meet Lucille Dickson McCrohan, the before picture.

And now the after.