Posted March 11, 2023
Last Sunday I went to the Emerald City Comicon for the express purpose of doing street photography, that is, if “streets” include those on other planets. These events are of course meccas for cosplayers, of which there were dozens, hundreds, and I’ll say right off the bat that the costumes were amazing; I remember them being so from years gone by but if anything the artistry has increased.
I made, in advance, the almost sacrilegious choice to shoot only black-and-white. I know, I know, to shoot these multi-hued creations in black-and-white, to reduce their exquisitely decorative surfaces to a human story, was in many ways to miss the point. But, well, that was my point, and I carried a stubborn pride at being the only one with a black-and-white LCD in a rainbow sea of aimed cellphones and thousand-dollar Sonys with G-Master portrait lenses.
My first target of amazement, though, was the venue itself: the Seattle Convention Center, thoroughly remodeled since my last visit years ago. It’s a five-story space with many vertiginous vistas opening within it: here a central courtyard that seems to fall forever, there a bleacher-wide wooden staircase running uninterrupted from ground to roof, tall windows everywhere, escalator highways ramping through slants of sun or criss-crossing in Escher-like abandon, floating terraces of glass, secret panes overlooking busy rooms below, etc.
All the Way Down
A Hike Under the Stars
Throughput Patterns
Funport USA
Skyway Overpass
Everywhere a Stair Stare
Cafeteria Moderna
Thoughts Are Elsewhere
The View from Faerie
Eyes in the Skybox
Stillness and Motion
Jumbo Scale Lounging
But I was mainly there for the same reason you’re presumably here: to see people in costume! Like I say, there were dozens of them to shoot, left and right, all day long, so many that the unusual became the usual. I had the most fun framing aliens and superheroes walking among nonchalant humans or amid mundane scenes, in other words trying to tell a story. But in many cases I was reduced to simply taking celebratory snaps of the most outrageous or beautiful.
Open Carry Permit
Elf Assured
Your City Is Insignificant
Off Duty
Refugees from Fiction
Spellbinding
Say Brains
Everyday Hero
Spaceport Jetlag
Strange Customer
Greensleeves
Princessly Pout
O Captain
Spiderman!
Friendly Neighborhood Chat
Staff Meeting
Hair Check
Steampunk Rest Stop
What More Could You Want
The Night Is Young
Faerie and Child
No Bones About It
A Fine Appraisal
Meanwhile in the Eyrie
Earth Station, Day One
I was having such a good time—and the show was so large to explore—that I easily wandered straight past lunch hour on no breakfast, and finally I realized I’d taken so many photos of people in costume that I was exhausted by them. So I started to turn my focus more toward the ordinary people at the event, returning to street photography proper, as it were. Believe it or not there were a few of those present too.
Mini Magicians
Backstage Hijinks
Totoroooo
Call of the Wild
All Comers
Bring It On
Onward Brought
Indoor Amusement
Observing, for the Moment
The City Is His
Picture This
Spectatee Seating
The Hell with Convention
Textured Timeout
The Upstairs Lounge
Feast on This
Asleep at the Wall
Partied Out
Resting Up
Scooter
So that was my street photography day at Comicon. I succeeded in not buying anything from the mountains of merchandise available, but came home with a treasure trove of my own, that took me four solid evenings to cull and edit in Lightroom. It makes for a good excuse to inaugurate this blog, indeed an onerous one, as I’m not at all sure I’ll be able to follow it up with anything remotely as entertaining.
I’m not sure how often I’ll be updating this blog. Part of launching this website is to push me back into doing photography, following a layoff period of many months, but it remains true that I have scant free time in which to get out and practice it. For now, of course, it doesn’t matter as no one in the world is likely to notice this blog. Eventually I have plans to “backdate it” by entering old photography outings that I think were fruitful—but I don’t want to do that until I get it running forward in real time a bit.
Well, we’ll see how it goes.