I really think Bravo is missing out on something. People psyching themselves up to do something crazy, over-the-top fashion, and grown men shrieking like little girls; what is this new, as-yet-unproduced, reality TV series?  Why, the Special Olympics Minnesota Polar Plunge, of course.  There’s even a built-in path for spinoffs, a la the Housewives franchise, by focusing on specific fashion genres. For example, the series that’s limited to ’80′s outfits could be called Say Grunge To The Plunge.

Or not.  I’ve written in this space before about how much I believe in Special Olympics Minnesota, and how I’m happy to donate my time to help them publicize their events and their fundraising efforts.  So after shooting another Polar Plunge yesterday and hearing the suggestion that I should do a post on the plunges, here it is.  And if anyone from Bravo is reading, please spell my name correctly on the development fee check.

I shot an assignment recently at Minnesota’s 8th Wonder of the World, the Mall of America.  I was shooting for a Norwegian magazine doing a story pitching the Mall as a reasonable place for Norwegians to do their Christmas shopping.  Clearly, the exchange rate has gotten a little out of hand.  In addition to the obvious shots, like the amusement park, the aquarium, the Mall’s head of PR in a Santa hat out in front of the mall, we spent a lot of time in lingerie shops.  I got the feeling the photos I was shooting, and the story being written, were conveying a sense of “those crazy Americans, look what they’ve gone and built” while at the same reveling in and celebrating that very same over-the-top quality.  Which I guess is as a good a way as any to describe how I (and I suspect a lot of other locals) feel about the place.  When the circus plays in your backyard every day, it’s easy to become blase and jaded about it, but it’s still loads of fun.

Everyone experiences a particularly tenacious earworm from time to time, but the one that still has me in its hold has been going now for close to a month.  It’s set to the tune of Elvis’ “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”, but is retitled, “I Reduce, I Reuse, I Recycle”, and sung by Eco Elvis, an Elvis impersonator I photographed at the First Annual Green Schools Conference.  The thing is, despite its having latched onto my cortex like a lamprey eel, I really like it, and have caught myself trying to hit those rich baritone notes in the shower.  Couple that with a recent moment in which I was “shown the true light of recycling” by my dearest, and I am now singing a greener tune.

One of the things I love about doing conference, convention and tradeshow photography is the opportunity it gives me to learn by osmosis.  As I’m shooting keynotes, workshops and breakout sessions, I get to absorb the content being presented.  In fact in many ways, I can do a better job if I have some understanding of what’s being presented.

In this way, I’ve gotten to learn a little about a wide variety of topics, including school safety, the less obvious challenges faced by the blind, how to get your high school junior into the college of their choice, the long-term effects of global warming on the practice of architecture, how to design a city to withstand a category 3 hurricane, and the caveats to consider when administering massage therapy to cancer patients.  This last one is something I heard about last week as I covered the national convention of the American Massage Therapy Association, held at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

It sounds like a bad joke to say that this was a ‘hands on’ event, but as the photos show, attendees had plenty of opportunities to learn new techniques, and I certainly had a lot of fun shooting them as they practiced their craft.