It was time.
We have not gathered to shoot photos in quite some time now so Aaron found there was a beard competition happening in Chattanooga and decided to make his way down for it.
When he arrived we spent the evening playing with stuff (his new Z8 in particular) and catching up. But then it was off to bed so we could get up and start our big day of photography.
The next morning comes around and we down some coffee and make a plan to meet up about lunchtime as I had to go to our Church’s Association as a delegate. Seems I made a mistake and assumed I didn’t need to go… lol, I see what that got me. Anyway, I really enjoy Association so it wasn’t like a chore, it meant changing plans a little from the original plans for the day.
So after I finish with business at association, I head over to the Harley Davidson dealership which is where the beard competition is being held. There I find Aaron is short order and it is really crowded. He basically tells me to get my camera out and take a picture with it so I sheepishly do as I am told.
You see I am not very aggressive with my photography especially when it involves people. I will ask at times but most of the time, this is why I don’t shoot aggressive street stuff. So now I am starting to get some photos and it is exactly as he mentioned. People happy to get their photos captured are everywhere. Like this fellow below, he was more than happy to pose for me. I will be honest, this kind of event is the perfect thing to break down your personal barriers to shooting photos of people you don’t know.
Even the girls got in on the fun!
Well the beard competition winds down about 3 or so in the afternoon and we decide to rearrange the rest of the day to shoot some street photography in downtown and also to go have supper at a great Italian restaurant later on.
The streets of Chattanooga were busier than usual with it being a holiday weekend but it still wasnt really bad where we went for our walk.
We found this mural with the light reflecting from the building across the alley and it was just something you couldn’t pass up.
We started on Main Street and then headed down Market Street to about 7th where we turned over to Broad Street and then back towards Main eventually diverting over to Cowart street before arriving at the truck.
So now you have the route, let see what we got. I kept joking about channeling my inner Eggleston as I would take photos of the mundane. Another thing I have learned is my Leica wants to shoot about 2/3 stop over exposed compared to my friends Nikon cameras. I kept -2/3 stop exposure compensation dialed in the whole time. I did this to keep the sky from being blown out as the shadows would be dark due to the bright afternoon sun. I will dig into the setup on my camera more to see if I can find out why it is doing that.
Along the way we saw a lot of cool stuff to photograph, like in the images below where it is different light so the images come out different from my usual time of day. With the light further over to the west we kept getting these awesome light spill shots like the one below of the old Rone Regency Jewelers location. This location will be sorely missed by me when they finally do something with this building. I love the gritty nature of the old signage and it wasn’t long ago that the windows were not boarded up so you could actually see inside the store. Even so, the black painted plywood makes a nice contrast to the lighter color of the upper section of the building bringing balance to the image.
We also found a few people to photograph as well. It was not quite as busy as I had figured it would be for a holiday weekend in the downtown area, but there were a few people out and about and I was able to grab a few photos of them. The Leica SL2 is a great camera for this kind of photography as it makes stunning portraits as well as makes for a wonderful, albeit heavy, street camera.
All in all we had a great time and then even got to go eat wonderful Italian cuisine later too. What more could you ask for? Well, there is one more thing I could ask for…
Lightroom Classic… I did it, I went over to the dark side and installed Lightroom back on my system again. It has the power to edit like I need finally and I kept running into problems that Exposure couldn’t easily solve for me so it was time to upgrade…or move over laterally to or what ever you call it…So going forward, I will be learning how to use Lightroom to edit my photos…wish me luck.
If you want to see more abotu this day, I made a vlog cideo about the photowalk portion of the day and it can be watched here.