Funny Photos

Robert Adams has a short chapter in Why People Photograph on humor in photography. He writes, "Visual art that is funny has always been...a rare species." Indeed. There are lots of cute photos, sweet photos, photos that bring a smile to your face. But really funny photos, photos that make you laugh rather than simply smile, these do seem to be pretty rare. Adams gives a great example: Lee Friedlander's 1966 photo showing a fire brigade posing for a graduation-style group photo - in front of a burning house. (You can see it at the Fraenkel Gallery's online show, here.)

Well, National Geographic has just posted the funniest picture I've seen in a long time:



While the couple tried to take a picture of themselves, a squirrel heard the camera beeping and walked over to investigate. Auto-focus was drawn to the squirrel, and that was that. Click the picture to read more about it.

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Why aren't there more funny photos? If there were a secret to taking funny photos, I'd love to know it, because I bet there's money in it!

It's too easy to say that humor is mostly verbal. There may be a lot of truth to that, but it's not enough. Occasionally the newspaper funnies are actually funny, and sometimes, they can be funny even without words. Berke Breathed's Bill the Cat is funny plain and simple. And the great silent movies of Chaplin and Keaton can be hilarious.

Does humor require narrative? The cheeky squirrel photo is funny at first glance, but even funnier if you think about it for two seconds until you "get it," that is, until you reconstruct in your head what must have happened. There certainly are photos that show the "after" state but imply the "before," so you can infer from them a brief sequence of events. I can't think of a good example off the top of my head but I know they're out there.

Adams mentions incongruity as an element in humor. An arrogant dandy in a three piece suit who slips on a banana is funny. A poor old grandmother who slips and falls is an object of pity. Adams also suggests that it's important that the subject in the photo be aware that they are part of a joke, but I am sure that can't be right all the time. A photo of a cat who falling into the toilet bowl head first will be funny to us, although the cat doesn't know it's part of the joke and if it did, it would not consider the joke funny or, for that matter, in good taste.

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I suspect the main problem is that real life simply doesn't contain many moments of purely visual humor. Real life is crazy funny but it's not usually funny just to look at. I don't think I'm just not looking hard enough, although if you have to look hard, that pretty much proves my point. The humor in life usually does come from events that have a narrative structure - this person was in that situation expecting this other thing to happen, and then something unexpected happened instead. And these narratives are hard to compress into a single scene. (Note that I'm not denying the possibility of a humorous sequence of photos. But here I'm talking about "normal" photos taken singly.)

I can think very quickly of a hundred funny stories about things that have happened to me, or to me and my wife. But the only one I can think of that would have made a pretty good picture, goes back to when one of our daughters was in middle school in Houston. She was part of a school dance pageant. One of the acts involved a group of very young (first grade?) Mexican-American children dancing in traditional dress - girls wearing big flouncy skirts, boys wearing charro suits and sombreros. Well, it became apparent to the audience fairly early into their number that one boy was having a problem with his pants. His belt was too loose. He hiked his pants up whenever he had a chance but this was difficult because the dancing requires that he frequently hold hands with his partner, a girl, so his pants kept sliding down. By the middle of the number, the audience was laughing openly. Somehow the boy kept his pants on...until the end of the dance. When the final chords were being played, it became clear to the audience that the girls were going to jump into the arms of the boys. The boy had a decision to make. To lift the girl up he was going to have to use both of his hands. He made the right decision: he caught his girl. And his pants finally fell all the way to the floor. That would have made a very funny picture, because I think the viewer would have been able to fill in the rest of this narrative. Still, something a photo cannot do at all is create suspense, and that was one of the most suspenseful things I've ever seen. When the boy caught the girl, the audience erupted in laughter - and leapt to its feet to applaud the gallant young man. The photo would have been funny, but the event as it happened was hilarious.

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There's not a lot of humor in purely instrumental music, either, by the way.

FlashWave 2 radio triggering system

Want to take better flash photographs? There are lots of things you can do, but the basic idea for most of them is to get the flash coming from some direction other than the direction of the camera's lens.

The easiest way to do this is to abandon the camera's built-in flash in favor of a removable hot-shoe flash unit (sometimes called a strobe). You can improve things more by learning to bounce the light from the hot-shoe unit. Even better, if you have a camera that supports optical wireless control of remote flash units, you can get the flash units off the camera completely. But controlling remote flash units with optical triggering is not completely reliable and the slave flash units have to be placed where they can see a strong signal from the control flash on the camera. You can't place optically controlled flashes completely out of sight of the controller, like, for example, behind a screen or around a corner. Optical triggering doesn't suck, by any means. If it works in a given situation, it's easy to use and it's basically free, or it is for me, because my Pentax cameras and my Pentax and Metz flash units all support it. But when it doesn't work well--which is a lot of the time--then it's

So most serious flash photographers use radio controlled flash. The idea here is that you attach a small transmitter to the camera, usually by mounting it where you would normally mount a flash unit. And you attach your remote flash units to receivers. When you click the camera's shutter, an electric signal is sent through the hot shoe. This would normally trigger a hot-shoe mounted flash, but when you have a radio transmitter mounted instead of a flash, the transmitter sends out a signal to its receivers, and they in turn trigger the flash units.

I'm working with FlashWave 2 units from G9Chron. They were recommended by some friends on the Pentax Forums list. They are a lot more economically priced than, say, Pocket Wizards, but they are reputed to be very reliable and easy to use. One advantage is that the FlashWave units come with built-in hot shoe adapters. This matters to me because my Pentax and Metz flash units don't have the ports necessary to connect to the FlashWave receivers via cable. And even if they did, hot shoe is much easier. If you're going to go wireless, why not go all the way?

Here's a simple photo that gives a basic idea of what's so neat about radio triggers.

This photo was taken with my Pentax K20D and one (just one) NIKON SB-18 Speedlight, a FlashWave 2 transmitter on the camera and a FlashWave 2 receiver attached to the Speedlight.

Note that the flash is down the hallway and around the corner. It is, in fact, around the corner and about 8 ft to the left. I could not use optical triggering with the flash placed like this: the triggering preflash would not make it to the remote unit.

I would also like to emphasize how neat it is to be able to use a Nikon flash with my Pentax camera. The radio triggering system doesn't care whether the flashes it's triggering are one brand or another, so I can use this little old Nikon flash (which I bought used for a few dollars, to use with my old Nikon N65 film SLR) even though I am not using a Nikon camera. Of course, I can also use my Pentax-compatible Metz 58 AF-1 or my Pentax 540FGZ units, but if triggering is handled by FlashWave 2's radio signalling, then it doesn't matter that these units are Pentax compatible. They're just flashes.

I'm quite pleased with the FlashWave 2. It's been 100% reliable for me. I thought it had failed to fire on me once, for a second or two, until I realized I hadn't turned the receiver on. Duh. The units are well made. Set up was child's play. Transmitter and receivers came with batteries and already set to the same channel. All I had to do was attach the units to the camera and flash units respectively and shoot.

If you're used to shooting flash with your camera's auto-exposure system (called P-TTL on Pentax systems), you'll have to learn how to control the flash output manually. This is easier than it seems. Actually, in this photo, there was nothing to do at all, because the SB-18 is so simple it does not have any controls. When I did an earlier version of this shot with the Metz 58 AF-1, I set it to 1/4 power and that was about right.

If you do check out the FlashWave units, be aware that G9Chon currently sells two products: the FlashWave 2 radio triggers, which have been around for a little while, and a newer product called FW-1B. The FW-1B is not a FlashWave. It's less expensive than the FlashWave 2, but it's also less powerful (so it's designed mainly for use in small studio environments) and it doesn't come with the built-in hot shoe adapters, so with my flash units, at least, I'd need to pay extra to buy adapters separately. I have not tried the FW-1B. But I can certainly recommend the FlashWave 2.

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Post scripta.

Couple things I forgot to mention earlier. First, if you know little about off-camera flash photography and would like to learn more, The Place To Go on the Web is http://strobist.com. And once you start getting the hang of it, you might then like to read Joe McNally's latest book, The Hot-Shoe Diaries. This guy's one of my heros.