(I wrote this post just after the summer solstice
and put it aside until I got around to finding the photograph I wanted to use
with it. Of course, I promptly forgot
about it until looking for something else today – sigh.)
I photographed at the Fremont Solstice Parade
yesterday. This hardly qualifies as a
news flash since I do so nearly every year.
The photograph above, taken a couple of years ago, pretty much sums up
the ecstatic, even manic energy of the event.
This mob, accompanied by boisterous music, broke into a full-scale,
whooping and yelling charge for no apparent reason about fifty feet before they
reached where I was standing. Fifty feet
beyond where I was standing they were back to a normal pace, still laughing and
yelling. There are a few photographs from the parade on my
website, www.ronfstop.com.
[Digression:
Just in case there is somebody reading this who is not from the Seattle area; Fremont is a Seattle neighborhood on the north side of the ship canal
that connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington . Formerly a blue-collar neighborhood of ship
chandlers, boat builders, and mill workers, it morphed into an arts/crafts
neighborhood and is in the process of morphing again into a high-tech live/work
neighborhood. This year was the 25th
Fremont Solstice Festival -- an arts/crafts/music street fair and a wonderfully
goofy parade. The parade allows no
motorized vehicles, no commercially-sponsored entries, and no text. The entries all have a home-cooked flavor to
them, whether a ragtag marching band, the entire student body of Salmon Bay
School -- a Seattle alternative elementary school -- riding unicycles or (my
all time favorite in the year that the theme was "fertility") an
elaborate float that was a veritable mountain populated by a bevy of
beautifully costumed and ostentatiously pregnant women. The official start of the parade is
traditionally but unofficially led by a posse of bicyclists wearing elaborate
and beautiful body paint but little or nothing else. Some even skip the body paint. Here endeth the digression.]
I staked out a place on the curb about an hour
before the parade started and struck up a conversation with the guy on my
left. Before long a youngish couple, man
and woman, strolled up and joined us on my right. The man was shirtless and, less expectedly,
she was too. I must have done a bit of
a double take because she laughed. I
complemented her on getting into the spirit of the parade. I sure meet some interesting people.
The festival organizers were expecting 20,000 or
so visitors but I'll bet there were more than that present for the parade
alone. It was a zoo. I'm a big fan of a huge, cheerful crowd but
enough is enough, already. If there
were, in fact, 20,000 people there then about 5000 of 'em had one or more
high-end digital SLR's, fully outfitted with oatmeal-carton-sized zoom lenses,
strung on their necks. My friend Doug says that they are not photographers but
PWC's (people with cameras). They were
everywhere, popping up like jacks-in-the-box or standing in the middle of the
street filling up one memory card after another. Even more numerous and intrusive were the
camera-phone contingent, holding their smart phones above their heads and
effectively occluding the view of anybody behind them.
I took four rolls of film -- standing at the curb
and getting in nobody's line of sight.
The parade organizers provide (for a modest fee) a "press
pass" that gives you the privilege of being in the street with a
camera. Next year maybe I'll get one and
walk the parade route backwards, keeping moving so I won't materially get in
anybody's way – at least not for very long.
(But I digress once again.)
Of the 140 or so negatives I work-printed 14 and
of those there are three or four that I will print. That's pretty slim pickings partly because I
have photographed the parade many times and it takes a pretty good image to
make it into the boxes with the 80 or more that I already have printed. The other issue is that the Fremont
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