Seafair, Part 1: It rained on my parade.

Seafair is Seattle’s annual celebration of people, boats and airplanes that spans two weeks every summer. There are a lot of neighborhood parades during a two-week span, but parade-wise, the big event is the Torchlight Parade that runs through downtown Seattle. Working for the organizers, I was tasked with making some compelling images showing smiling happy people watching the parade in the early evening setting sun.

Which is a good plan, right up until the rain started.

“Can you make it look like it’s sunny?”, asked one of the organizers.

I thought for a moment. “Do we have a big enough hair dryer to dry all of Fourth Avenue?”, I replied. ”

He called me some names, and I promised to do the best I could. I though to myself that if I couldn’t magically dry the streets, make rain jackets disappear from parade-goers and change the quality of light from dark and cloudy to warm and sunny, well, then, I’d have to make the weather itself disappear.

My premise was not to show the weather at all. That way, next year, when the photos are used in programs, brochures and ads, it wouldn’t look like rain, and maybe everyone will have forgotten that it wasn’t gorgeous and sunny (by the way, Seattle had one of it’s nicest summers ever — something like 30+ straight days without rain…so go figure).

To do this, I thought I’d mess with flash — drag it, zoom it, spin it. Anything to add a fun and zany feel to the photos (and c’mon — when’s the last time you used the word “zany”?)

The event starts with an 8k race whose last half is run along the parade route right through downtown.

This guy tried hard to tie in the theme of the night with his own, uh, desires?

When you’re shooting for the organizers, you gotta show the logos and sponsors. A little help from a camera with a wide-angle lens mounted on a monopod helped me get the height required to look down on the participants while including the logo.

While it was gloomy and cloudy during the race, the first actual drop of rain didn’t fall until the parade started in earnest.

It was easy to find great faces along the parade route. Doesn’t everyone love a parade? Actually, I’m not sure if these kids loved a parade nearly as much as they did having their picture taken.

What’s a parade without clowns…?

…and drill teams…

…and PIRATES…?

Okay, as far as I know, the pirates thing is unique to Seattle. Called the Seafair Pirates, this group of, well, clowns dressed in skulls and crossbones, rampages around the city during Seafair. They pride themselves on scaring kids, preying on the local wenches and generally disrupting the relative quiet of the city with booming cannon rounds from their wheeled ship, the aptly named Moby Duck.

Yeah, if you were a little kid, or a woman in her 20’s, you’d be scared too.