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Friday Slide Show: SantaCon
15 December 2017
SantaCon may have started in San Francisco 15 years ago, as local legend has it, but this year there are SantaCon events in 397 cities in 52 countries. So you probably know it's a convention of people dressed as Santa. Or reindeer. Or elves. Or even snowmen.
There tends to be something more to it. Bar hopping is common, as in the SantaCon Pub Crawl. Gift collecting is almost as common. But, as today's slide show demonstrates, it's also quite a photo opp.
And we don't mean our photos, taken last weekend mostly at Union Square.
We mean selfies. Nearly everyone was brandishing a smartphone and snapping photos of themselves and friends at arm's length or with a selfie stick. A few larger groups even featured a designated photographer.
While the official SantaCon site insists a Santa hat is not enough, it was enough for many attendees. But as the site also notes, "the theme is red."
As if to thwart any record of the event, Santa red is in the sour part of the spectrum, goofily oversaturated and inaccurate.
And as any digital photographer knows, the red spectrum is not something a sensor handles very well. As if to thwart any record of the event, Santa red is in the sour part of the spectrum, goofily oversaturated and inaccurate.
And everybody was wearing it.
That, you might think, would call for monochrome images. But not when "the theme is red."
We are, however, happy to report that there is also a tradition of monochrome Santa, even if we missed her. This year Christine Noel sacrificed her rouge for a gray wig, contacts and 1.5 hours in makeup to desaturate her skin tones.
We wore green to identify ourselves as official non-participants. And we used our 18-200mm zoom with no polarizer so we could intrude without being rude.
Even the people looking directly at the camera, we suspect, had no idea we were taking their photo. Libations, perhaps, account for the blank stares -- or it might have been that we looked in a different direction after pressing the shutter, a trick we learned as child.
Just a few years ago all this generation (and it is primarily yutes) believed in Santa, putting out cookies and milk for the jolly figure (and a few carrots for the reindeer).
Now they're dressing like him and bar hopping.
