Photography - Inner Tubes

For this assignment I chose to focus on inner tubes. This was a natural decision because I have a summer job as a Event Manager with a company called Slide the City, which is a giant 1,000 foot long slip n’ slide that travels to different cities throughout The U.S. and Canada. This weekend my time would be completely wrapped up with one of our events in Alberta, Canada, and there would literally be thousands and thousands of tubes everywhere. Inner tubes come in so many different shapes and sizes, and I wish I could have captured all of the crazy ones I saw throughout the weekend.

This first picture is a simple picture of the tubes that our company provided for sliders. This weekend’s tubes were the classic round inner tubes, and they came in colors of yellow and green. Inner tubes can come in any color and say anything you could ever image. This makes them extremely customizable, which allowed us to brand them for our company.

This next picture is less appealing because these tubes aren’t inflated yet. A blown-up tube is infinitely more exciting to look at than a saggy, flat deflated one – it’s crazy what a little bit of exhaled air can do on a visually aesthetic level.

This picture shows a group of friends showing off their different styles of tubes. As you can see, some of these people brought tubes of their own that were different from the branded tubes provided at the event. Surprisingly, tubes can become a very effective way of expressing yourself in unique and creative ways.

I asked if I could take a picture of this lady’s tube because the design was so cool. It’s a dolphin tube with handles in the front so people can ride the tube as if they were riding on the back of a dolphin. This was just one of many novelty tubes that people were using throughout the day. I saw some that were designed to look like giant pretzels, penguins, hotdogs, and the list goes on. While these tubes look infinitely cooler than the basic round inner tubes, it’s worth noting that they don’t slide quite as fast. 

This last picture is a picture of the giant slip n’ slide. It only has about 2/3 of the slide actually showing, but to paint the picture a little more clearly we shut down a major rode in the city for two days to make room for it. The event had almost 7,000 people in attendance, and every one of them was there to slide on tubes. As the picture shows everyone has some sort of tube with them. I’ve always looked down upon tubes as some sort of trashy pool toy. However, in the right context, even a simple inner tube can be viewed as something priceless and coveted.