Knox Pride 2019
What does a concert pianist do every day?
Their scales.
Seems mundane, doesn’t it? But any expert will tell you": practice, practice, practice - practice until you have an expertise infused into your muscles.
For me, that means taking a day off from client work and shooting street photography. I love street photography as a photographic genre. Like a good book, it allows the viewer to see a new perspective. But what can it do for a wedding photographer? Your wedding day is a street and there are cool things happening on it, so the more I practice, the better I can capture rapid moments at your ceremony or reception.
Because life happens quickly.
In fact, ask a professional photographer, “What do you shoot for fun?” If he or she can’t answer that, don’t hire them.
The Knoxville Pride Parade marches down Gay Street, literally . . .
Anyway, one event with a target rich environment for street photography is the annual Knoxville Pride Parade. It’s a raucous event - certainly tame by, say, San Francisco standards but raucous with cheering and whooping.
It is actually hard to shoot something like this. I am not making images for anyone but myself, so I don;t point my camera everywhere if I was actually covering this for a client. Shoot someone with something, something rainbow on them? Okay, everyone has rainbows on them. The trick is to find what may have another interesting factor to the picture. That is not going to be every photo I take, to be sure, but something in these photos caught my eye and I just want to use them to make the point about photographers needing to practice in an unfamiliar environment and one that presents a challenge.
And to let other people see them.
And thank you, Knoxville Police Department, for allowing me to dart in and out of the parade traffic to get my shots.
And yes - the main thoroughfare of Knoxville is Gay Street. I wonder if we are the only city that legitimately has a pride parade down Gay Street, you know, without renaming “Main Street” or “2nd Avenue” for the day?
Click on the images to see them in full size.
