Judge Carmen at Maastricht Carnaval

At the carnival in Maastricht I stood for quite a while on a bench in a crowd in front of a stage. A male choir kept the audience warm with their enthusiastic singing, even at one stage singing about what I was doing. Mrs S said, they are pointing at you, saying something about photo. Neither of us understand much spoken Dutch, and I wondered if I had offended somebody, but my fears were unfounded. It was a song about taking photos, that word being mentioned many times accompanied by the lead singer pointing at me. I could only smile back in return and point my camera at somebody else in the crowd. Nobody seemed to mind, several of them (in particular women for some reason) more or less posing, smiling into the camera. But the best shots are normally of people who are unaware of the photographer.

This week’s picture is not one of outstanding beauty, but more of outstanding happiness on a man’s face. This bespectacled gentleman was dressed as Carmen, red dress with black dots and black wig and all. But the hair piece had been slightly dislodged and looked more like a black version of an English judge’s court wig and a Caribbean pirate’s floppy hair combined!

Judge Carmen had bumped into a couple he knew, but who did not recognise him at first in his outlandish outfit, so he had to “identify” himself. He laughed heartily at their reaction.

What I like in particular about this split-second out of the five seconds it all took, is that it tells a whole story, in a blink, his expression being representative of the atmosphere of this annual event, sheer joy, fun and some silliness.