It was such a nice day today, I felt it would really be a waste if I didn’t do something with it, so I headed down to Ocean Beach in New London. I figured I might take some pictures of the somewhat run-down buildings (and the vacant waterslide, which is kind of eerie in the winter). But instead I happened upon a group of kids who were skateboarding (big no-no, they told me later—usually they get shooed away by security or the cops) and figured, hey, here’s an interesting photo subject.

At first I kept my distance, shooting them with my zoom lens, not wanting to bother them. But one of them noticed and I heard him tell his buddies, “Hey, some guy’s taking pictures of us,” so in a desire to avoid being thought of as creepy, I walked up and asked if they wanted to see what I’d taken so far. That got them more interested, and after seeing what I’d done, they were suddenly really excited to have me take all sorts of pictures of them trying tricks on the boardwalk. I think they were a little confused that I had such a nice camera but didn’t work for a newspaper or something similar; I got asked more than once about my reasoning for taking photos (“you mean you just take pictures of random stuff?”).

Before I headed off, I gave them the address to my Flickr page and told them that they could expect to see them uploaded later in the day. All in all, they were really cool about having a stranger take photos of them, and they provided for some amazing subjects in action photography.

(On a side note, MOO.com offers Flickr-based business cards for, I suppose, this specific purpose. I need to order a set, I think, in case something like this happens again.)


Link to the Flickr gallery