Indiana State Fair

Maria and I spent about seven hours tramping around the Indiana State Fair yesterday afternoon and last night.
We did the obligatory tour of the Home and Family Arts Building to check out the quilting and photography exhibits and were already kind of tired by the time the sun went down and the real reason we were there cranked up.
The Midway - that noisy, dirty, garish preview of Hell that draws kids and their captive parents like moths to a porch light.
It was the first really extended night shoot I've done with the Nikon D200 and I'm very impressed with how well it sorts out the white balance problems and how little noise there is at the higher ISO settings, like 1600. I shot available light all evening with startlingly good results.
This is one of my favorite photos of the night. Darkness had fallen, but there was still enough light in the western sky to spread a beautiful rich blue across the horizon. It was shot at 1/80 sec, f/4.5 at 1600 ISO. If you click on it, you can see a larger version and judge the quality a little better. The photographer in khaki by the railing is a freelancer from California who is putting together a book of photos of carnival and fair midways.
Several of the people we photographed wanted copies of the pictures, so we gave them our business cards with our photo sales site URL and posted an assortment of shots. The gallery went online at 10:30 a.m. and now, about 12 hours later, there have been about a dozen hits but no sales. You never know who's going to buy what, so I don't get my expectations up.
We've sold about $200 worth of wedding photos from the site in the last six weeks and I never expected to sell any, so who knows?
Anyhow, it was the first time I'd been back to the state fair in several years. I handled The Indianapolis News' state fair coverage from 1975 through 1985, spending the entire run of the fair at the fairgrounds, so I know/knew the place pretty well. Not much has changed in the 20 years since I was immersed in the fair. Probably the most significant difference, to my sensibilities, is the whoring out of the building names. The Coliseum is now the Pepsi Coliseum and various other buildings now have some corporate sponsor's name tacked on.
It's so hopelessly cheesy. Just like the monstrous cheese sculpture in the Pioneer seed corn building, formerly the Universities Building.