I had the pleasure of being a tour guide and hanging out with Chris Klug from Patterns of Light n’ Dark last Thursday. Chris hails from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and is a film shooter, so I brought along a Lieca M3 for him to tryout plus he rented a Contax from Glazers and then we headed for Pike Place Market. It had been a few years since I visited the Market and not a lot has changed. Busy and lots of people from all over the world as well as the locals. We spent several hours wandering the Market and then the Seattle center which was in the midst of getting ready for Bumbershoot festival.
As the day got later I had planned to find Kerry Park so that Chris could get a shot of the Seattle Skyline and Mt Rainier, I knew it was a small park up on Queen Anne hill somewhere and figured that during the week it would be pretty deserted. Oh boy was I wrong. We found it with minimal ally detours and there was a couple of hrs till sunset and already there were a bunch of folks shooting each other and the skyline. I set Chris up with my tripod and we shot a few of the sun reflecting off the city. I wandered around holding strangers cameras and taking picture of them with Seattle in the background as well as listening to a lecture on how cool the new D5000 was and “look at this, the screen swivels” Nice people all around. As the sun got lower in the horizon the tripod forest began to grow and grow. Till I turned and the longest Hummer I ever saw pulled up, I said to Chris “watch some big shot photog will climb out of that” we laughed till we saw:
Ok now I’ve seen it all. I had to ask though,…… they had been on an Alaskan tour boat and were headed back to KY and OK, stated “You only live once and it was overcast in Alaska”.
Makes me wonder what they drive to a shoot in Texas if this was a guy from Oklahoma
Anyway this was a shot before the sun went down
I can’t wait to see what Chris got as I got junk for most of the day and still had a great time visiting with him and Seattle. It was a good day of shooting and conversation about photography, art and work. I really hope to do this again sometime, the conversation was great and I am considering a Mamiya 645 which should make Paul Lester laugh a lot. All in all a great time was had and I learned a lot about street shooting that was different from the normal at home. Things happen a lot faster in the city than they do in a smaller town like PT. Light and focus changes a lot faster and the lens I took along wasn’t up to it like I wished.
Hey JerseyStyle it is your turn and we should give that new 50D a tryout in the rain, we can bill it as East Coast Canon / West Coast Nikon. More photos from that day will surface and check out Chris for some.
rlketcham.com





Ray, I really enjoyed myself. You are a really great host and a very nice guy to boot. I think I got some good images with the Bessa, and I think I got some good images with the M3; whether I had all the settings correct with the Contax we shall see.
Sounds like you had a great day. You draw up the image in front of my eyes pretty good, how it was up there on the Queen Anne hill. Walking around holding other’s cameras and taking their pictures, a forest of tripods… The photographer who came down from an Alaska tour, in a mega sized hummer, saying it was cloudy anyway – where do all these people come from? Another planet?
I’ll get there as soon as I can, Ray. Though shooting PT sounds like my cup of java, too. I’ll put Fiddy in his rain slicker and me in my Merrill’s…we’ll get along just fine. Really cool that you and Chris got the chance to hang. And glad to see the Sooner is shooting Canon!
Later today, although I won’t have any images, I’ll deliver my write-up of the day on my blog. You guys meet up in PT, I wanna go too!
@Ove: I don’t know what planet the guy came from, but he has money; he had the BEST tripod, the BEST lenses, the BEST camera . . . not that I wish I had that equipment or anything . . .
Well, I got an unexpected chuckle when I saw my name mentioned along side the 645 and Chris’s name. Yes! Chris is very influential in his film evangelism. I’ve bought into wholeheartedly. Heck! I even bought a Leica, as you know!
I wish that I had known about you when I was in Seattle, actually Kent, last December. Unfortunately, it was a last minute business trip and we stayed for only about 2 1/2 days. Can you believe it? Fly from Charleston, SC all the way to Seattle, about 6 hours of flight time, and then only stay a couple of days. I took very few pictures.
Chris and I had plans to do Alamogordo, NM and White Sands and then the bottom fell out of his job, but we are planning for February, if you are interested!
It will be fun. I like hanging out with other blogger/photographers. It’s a total geekfest for all of those days! Nice!
I’m glad that you and Chris had such a good time. That photo of the skyline is wonderful! I never would have found that on my own. Should I make it back to Seattle, I’ll have to look you up so that we can hang!