Easter egg hunts… like a scene from “Braveheart”

I’ve got to say some of the most exciting and scariest things I photograph are Easter egg hunts.

I remember shooting one in Wake Forest, NC. I was waiting in an open field of thousands of eggs, ready to get the shot of kids running towards me.

Then they were off. A human wave coming directly at me like a scene from “Braveheart” – scores of children, motivated by candy, whipped into a wild frenzy by processed sugar.

Have you seen footage of great white sharks toothing through chummed waters?

Suddenly they were zooming all around me, forcing a retreat to safer ground. Fall back! Fall back!

And then came the most frustrating part – trying to get the name to match a picture of a young girl in a white Easter dress in a melee of dozens of girls in white Easter dresses.

This year I was shooting the hunts on the court square in Shelby. The mass of children was smaller because they were well divided by age group. So there was a reduced “charging legion” effect. But the speed at which a few dozen kids can lay waste to an egg filled lawn still makes piranhas on a cow look lazy.

And in Shelby the parents get into it. In Wake Forest it seemed like parents held back more. But in a couple of the hunts here the folks jumped right in. And the long sidewalk worth of happy families bottlenecked as they advanced up their triangular egg field towards the courthouse like a rolling swarm of locusts, concentrating and blotting out sight of the grass.

Truth is I think it’s great fun. I’m just bitter they don’t have an egg field cordoned off for 23-year-olds.