Coming to Seattle from just south of the 60th parallel, I had expected the earth’s sunrise and sunset to be more in tandem with what happens for us in our north. I was surprised to find the sun rising much earlier than it was back home. On Saturday, our travel day home from Seattle, Washington to Edmonton, Alberta I was able to gather photo gear quietly without disturbing my wife and daughter and head out quite early to snap photos. While I captured images from Seattle’s downtown, two of the shots I’m liking deal with the moonrise at sunrise across Elliot bay. And, while there are five images presented there are only two images dealt with. One image plays with different lighting presets and composition while the other, the final one is pretty much straight out of the camera. Our waitress at the Andaluca restaurant caught the sight on her early morning jaunt to work. The sight was rare, something to see.
Quote to Inspire – “To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place … I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliot Erwitt
Listening to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album following a documentary on Pink Floyd that explored their reunion for the global Live 8 Concert; they’d been apart for some twenty odd years … two of those members have passed on. In the song Wish You Were Here that I’m listening to, Stephane Grappelli accompanies Pink Floyd. Interesting!
Early morning towards Pike Market Place – Seattle, Washington
Pike Place Public Market – Seattle, Washington
Pike Place Market Bus Stop – Seattle, Washington
The Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Corner of Pike Place & Pine Street – Seattle, Washington
Corner Market (opposite Pike Place Market) 1 – Seattle, Washington
Corner Market (opposite Pike Place Market) 2 – Seattle, Washington
Corner Market (opposite Pike Place Market) 3 – Seattle, Washington
The Original Starbucks (est. 1971), Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Looking southward to Pike Place Market 1 – Seattle, Washington
Pike Place Market signage 3 – Seattle, Washington
Looking southward to Pike Place Market 2 – Seattle, Washington
Looking southward to Pike Place Market 3 – Seattle, Washington
Meet the Producer, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Entrance, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Worker, looking out, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Tulips, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Place Pigalle, Restaurant & Bar, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Loback Meat Company signage, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
Entrance Lower Floor, Pike Place Market – Seattle, Washington
One feature of our Seattle trip was we were active throughout each day walking, travelling and walking some more. Being active helped us maintain body rhythms and daily routine. We were usually up at seven and on our way somewhere by eight. Breakfast, most mornings, was at the Andaluca Restaurant, a restaurant attached to Seattle’s Mayflower Park Hotel. These morning meals were sumptuous – Brioche French Toast, Hazelnut Waffles, Steel Cut Scottish Oats and Banana Pancakes; a side of pepper bacon was added twice. Coffee was made as coffee should be and our orange juice was fresh. From this restaurant we’d head out to Seattle, its sights and attractions.
And, we always seemed to return to the Pike Place Market at day’s end, from up above, street side or from down below from the harbor. We seemed to arrive each day within the market’s last hour of hustle and bustle as vendors went about closing up shop – a flurry of activity, enthusiasm, good-natured banter with customers and the mingling and flow of people in movement into their evening. The photos presented here capture the Pike Place Market at day’s beginning and at its day’s end.
Notable among the attractions in the Corner Market (across from the Pike Place Market) is the original Starbuck’s (established in 1971) named after Starbuck in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. In terms of the novel’s whaling adventures, this setting for a coffeehouse Starbuck would frequent is appropriate. The coffeehouse is a short twenty-minute climb up from the harbor piers of Elliot Bay to its location above the harbor, looking out onto the bay. This original Starbucks is the point from which the Starbucks’ empire has grown and it’s a company that has grown equally by way of its service provided as well as by the quality of its coffee. In It’s Not About the Coffee, Howard Behar (former Starbucks vice president) writes about the act of growing Starbucks by way of good leadership that emphasizes the relationship sustained between coffee consumer and service provider (Starbucks’ worker) – the human side of business.
Not only has good leadership and good business grown from this location, but, right across the street the Pike Place Fish Market has become a model for ‘cultural transformation and self-generative learning for organizations of all kinds.’ Their model for transforming an organization from within focuses on empowerment, transforming vision into reality and the conception that any organization has as one of its primary purposes that of making a difference in the world.
And, the business of the day continues, each day … in this very rich starting point … for many good things.
10 Principles of Personal Leadership (from Howard Behar in It’s Not About the Coffee – Leadership Principles from Life at Starbucks)
Know Who You Are: Wear One Hat
Know Why You’re Here: Do It Because It’s Right, Not Because It’s Right for Your Resume
Think Independently: The Person Who Sweeps the Floor Should Choose the Broom
Build Trust: Care, like You Really Mean It
Listen for the Truth: The Walls Talk
Be Accountable: Only the Truth Sounds like the Truth
Take Action: Think Like a Person of Action, and Act like a Person of Thought
Face Challenge: We Are Human Beings First
Practice Leadership: The Big Noise and the Still, Small Voice
Dare to Dream: Say “Yes,” the Most Powerful Word in the World
Quotes to Inspire – (1) “To photograph is to confer importance.” – Susan Sontag (2) “To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.” – Ansel Adams
Listening to – Counting Crows Omaha and Ghost Train; also listening to David Gray’sShine.
Pike Place Market - Neon Signs, Seattle, Washington
Street photography is something described as an audit of an environment that the photographer places him- or herself in. What’s there? What’s around you? What’s happening? All are questions that receive answer within the images produced and the street’s narrative is built and understood. If you’re actually photographing what’s happening in the street you’re bound to capture people in the act of whatever it is that they do. The street photography that I’ve looked through most recently is that of the Edmonton photowalk led by Darlene Hildebrand back in October 2011. The cluster of pictures from several photographers on that first Saturday afternoon in October present an audit of Life along Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue in Edmonton’s Old Strathcona area. Everything is captured – architecture (doors, buildings, windows); modes of transportation (cars, buses, trucks, bicycles); there’s a sense of space (that within the street and that which surrounds people, their personal space); there’s the colour and weather of the afternoon. Within most of it there’s the art of human endeavor. Conversely, there’s the defeat of endeavor no longer strived for; there are people broken and lost and at wits-end, the down and out. They too are captured in street photography. The photograph presented here is one taken from within the Pike Place Market in Seattle. To a certain extent it qualifies as street photography as it presents information about the environment of the market place – what you’ll find and what people are doing. What is surprising is the participatory element – people are tolerant of photographs being taken; it’s a touristy thing to do. Good. Maybe that’s the thing to think about in street photography – investigating the street by way of participation.
Listening to Bill Mallonee & Vigilantes of Love with She Walks on Roses, Patty Griffin’s Tomorrow Night and Over the Rhine’s Jesus in New Orleans, all from a genius playlist starting with Pierce Pettis’ Everything Matters album.
Quote to Inspire – “Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” – Dorothea Lange
SAM’S signage – The Underground Tour, Seattle, Washington 1
SAM’S signage – The Underground Tour, Seattle, Washington 2
SAM’S signage – The Underground Tour, Seattle, Washington 3
The term ‘grunge’ is something I associate with a photographic style in which elegance of form can be sussed out underneath evidence of decay; the elegance and the decay together are, in their juxtaposition, a thing of beauty. Grunge is also a Seattle term denoting a kind of raw alternative rock music that has its origin in this city. Musically, grunge owns guitar work with heavy distortion, dissonant harmonies and vocals/lyrics that must be sussed out. Grunge lyrics juxtapose angst and apathy of youth’s forward look to the rest of what Life offers; in these lyrics the mean of human condition – yours, mine, his and hers – is presented as something sullied, something confined, yet something that must move forward glimpsing more and more of what Life really is about. The lyrics are also about finding freedom within a sullied, confined life. The music and lyrics are the raw energy and angst in response to the experience of disillusionment and one’s discovering personally an identity in the mean of human condition. Together, the grunge music and lyrics expose the elegance and beauty found within our sullied human condition.
The following Seattle photographs were taken on the last leg of the Seattle underground tour, an object of grunge – form and decay juxtaposed. SAM’S was no doubt a store or bar or restaurant; the signage seems to associate to the fifties or sixties in style and was bulb lit rather than a neon sign.
Listening to Grunge – Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Joan Osborne’s celebrated song about the human mean, One of Us and Alice in Chains’ Heaven Beside You.
Quotes to Inspire – (1) “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” – Ansel Adams (2) “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” – David Alan Harvey
I spent most of last week on break, in and around Seattle, Washington. On Sunday, when we returned to Edmonton, my youngest brother asked me, “Why Seattle?” And, we let him know that our destination could just as easily have been New York, Cancun, San Francisco, the Utah mountains or St. John’s, Newfoundland. In any locale wherever we were our time would have been about chasing light in new and unfamiliar terrain and I could not have done any better than I have here, to look from east to west across Elliot Bay from Seattle’s Pike Place Market and to capture these windblown veils of rain as they mingle creating layers of sunlight, revealing landscape layers behind them. Seattle suits my interest because the landscape, weather and light are similar to that found on Vancouver Island where we’ve spent most of our summers with Mom and Dad, brothers, my grandparents and extended family. And, it has been years since I’ve been to Seattle with my family. In the time between visits, the nearby town of Forks, Washington has featured as location to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga, a set of novels that work to establish social mores among today’s teens, something that Jane Austen was doing with her narratives – helping young adults make good decisions in their lives. While we certainly could have gone out to Forks, we didn’t. The opportunity to stay put in Seattle and chase light with camera in hand ranked equally in importance to taking in other attractions.
Listening to a genius playlist surrounding the starting song from City of Angels, Angel by Sarah McLachlan; other songs include Alanis Morrissette’s Uninvited, Sheryl Crow’s Strong Enough, Round Here by the Counting Crows and Dido’s Thank You.
Quote to Inspire – “There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.” – Ernest Haas
In My Back Pocket - Photography 
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