Photo: A Ferris Wheel
Recently, we attended the Bartlett Festival in Bartlett, Tennessee. Jaylin and I attended as just regular visitors, and Laura was there as a vendor selling her jewelry. Interestingly, I believe this was my first time to go to the festival, even though I grew up in Bartlett and the festival was almost right around the corner from where we lived. But now I have been, even though we now live 30 miles away.
Anyway, one of the amusements at the festival was this Ferris Wheel. I asked Jaylin if he wanted to ride it, but because of some recent conversations we had recently had with friends about Ferris Wheels, he decided to skip it. It didn’t matter to me either way, but I did want to make sure I got a photo of it, mainly because the sky behind it was so cool as the clouds were coming in and replacing the nice blue color with white.
Believe it or not, the Ferris Wheel is not named after Ferris Bueller, despite what you may have heard. Instead, it was named after its inventor, George Wheel. Wait, a late-breaking development - the inventor’s name was actually George Ferris. Whatever.
The first Ferris Wheel was built for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. What better way to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World than to ride around in a big wheel that doesn’t really go anywhere as it rolls? Now that’s progress! Not that Christopher Columbus cared, because he wasn’t there for the Exposition, anyway. And in fact, he hadn’t visited Chicago 400 years earlier, either. But that is beside the point.
And from that first Ferris Wheel, we now have super-large Ferris Wheels, such as the one in London that always seems to get destroyed in disaster movies, to small Ferris Wheels that can be folded down and moved around on the back of a truck, such as this one.
George Ferris would be proud. As would be Christopher Columbus.
About the Photo
A single RAW exposure, processed in Photoshop. Read more about the photo software and gear I use at the camera gear page.
Camera: Olympus OM-D E-M10
Lens: Olympus 14-42mm IIR
