The first flea market I attended in Illinois and what a show it was! I was excited to get there with a couple of friends from work, not to strike any deals, but to document the event through photography. The flea market is held once a month in a suburb which is quite far from Chicago, at least 1h30m depending on traffic.

My equipment consisted of the Canon 30D (which I used for all the photos in this series), the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 and the Canon EF-S 10-22mm which I didn’t use for the event itself. I wanted to use the 50mm exclusively for this session, in order to capture the details of the various wares on display and also to deal with low light situations such as the indoor exhibits. In addition to the digital camera I also brought along the vintage film Canon F-1 borrowed from a gentleman at work, along with the Canon FD 50mm f/1.4. By now you should start seeing a pattern: yes, I am in love with the 50mm lenses, in particular f/1.4 ones. I swear by them. If I was forced to keep a single lens, I would definitely go for the 50mm. Finally, I loaded all this equipment into my Lowepro Slingshot 200AW.

The first impression when I entered the fair grounds was that I had been swindled by the gentleman at the entrance. The entrance fee for buyers was $5, which we paid in cash to this scruffy-looking dude who (of course) didn’t hand us any tickets. This leads me to wonder how much of that cash went into his own pockets.

The fair itself was fairly extensive and well organized. There were outdoor and indoor lots. Plenty of sellers and buyers. The stuff on sale was divided into 2 categories: brand new and old. The new stuff was pretty high quality, in general consisting of home-made goods such as preserved foods, furniture, decorations, stained glass, toys, jewelry, accessories and various others.

One thing that I didn’t like was the ever present dust. The whole fair was spread over dusty grounds and the wind was blowing hard, covering my equipment in a thin layer of powder. I had to wipe everything clean every few minutes and shield the cameras with my body whenever a more powerful squall beat upon me. I was especially concerned about the Canon F-1 since it wasn’t my own and I had to take good care of it.

I had planned to bring cash along but unsurprisingly I forgot. The only cash I had were the $5 in my wallet that I used to pay the entrance fee. Having become broke, my only role was as an observer. On the other hand I didn’t see much of anything that would have interested me. Herein lays the problem: most of the old stuff was junk. Rubbish. Crap. I really felt sorry for all those people who came from hell knows where (Wisconsin, Indiana or even further away), wasted their time, spent money on gas and more money on the selling fee (which I heard was about $20), and for what? Who the heck buys that stuff?

My feelings were mixed. There was amusement at the things people think of selling. There was pity for these same people. Finally there was admiration for the more significant wares: the manufactured products. In the end, I don’t regret the whole experience one small bit. Yes, it was tiring, I didn’t find any deals worth pursuing and it seemed that my equipment had swallowed tons of dreaded dust but the experience was worth all this and more.

I hope you will enjoy my photos and the following parts, since this is gonna be my longest series so far. I took many photos that day and even if many of them may not be to everyone’s liking, at least they tell a story and that was the purpose of the whole experience.

NOTE: For the first time in a year, I have actually taken steps towards showing my photos in bigger sizes. I have integrated the excellent Highslide JS script into my blog so that you can simply click on an image to zoom it to a bigger size.

ANOTHER NOTE: The script seems to be a bit quirky after I’ve integrated it, even though it worked fine when testing on a dummy page with dummy images. If the image doesn’t want to zoom, just click again anywhere inside the image and the larger version will be opened in a new window.

FINAL NOTE: The script should now work on any modern browser. I fixed the damn thing. I’d simply missed a slash in the code.

• Kane County Flea Market – Part 1
• Kane County Flea Market – Part 2
• Kane County Flea Market – Part 3
• Kane County Flea Market – Part 4
• Kane County Flea Market – Part 5
• Kane County Flea Market – Part 6

This entry was posted on Monday, June 4th, 2007 at 7:57 pm and is filed under Canon EOS 30D, Documentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.