A Second Chance Photo Walk in Nashville 7/31/21
The photography gods smiled on me last weekend. I do wrestle with the concept of luck in getting street photos, because you surely have to show up with an array of skills, or nothing is going to happen. At the same time, we all get lucky sometimes, some of us more than others. Perhaps we can create our own luck, or at least, influence the probability of it. I am fairly convinced the photography gods smiled on me because I went out on both Saturday and Sunday. It is a give and take situation.
I had a pretty good day on Saturday. I took 158 pictures. I kept 22 on my iPad, which is not to say I am finished culling through them. I would consider posting maybe 7 of them. That is way better than last week when I came home with a paltry 2 to consider as posts. I am happy to say I have gotten past the expectation that any day out is a predictor of future success or failure. Each day is what it is. There is a conundrum related to one sequence of pictures that I took. This sequence makes up 6 of the 22 images that I kept. Now I have to figure out what I want to do with them. They are pictures of a particular Girl Squad and, as is most often the case, it was a Bachelorette party celebration.
These Girl Squads are fun to shoot. The girls traditionally share something in common as a theme. Generally, they wear coordinated shirts and/or hats, but sometimes it is costumes. One of my early successes for the day was a group that was wearing the same shoes. It is easy to spot these groups. Surely there are an equal number of Bachelor parties, but I rarely can identify them. Guys are not given to dressing alike. The compositional bonus in the photos of them is the pattern repetition of whatever they have chosen as a common theme. It helps the viewer connect them, which viewers generally like to do.
This particular Girl Squad got my attention because they had matching Fanny packs with the word, Tribe, printed on them. That was a new theme for me. There also seemed to be a little more diversity in the group. The squad I had seen earlier in the day were all uniformly slender. Even their mothers and aunts were slender. They looked kind of like the popular crowd from a private university, which also makes great pictures. There was one more thing that was unique about these girls. There was clearly trouble brewing in the Tribe.
As I was taking the pictures, I needed two things to happen. I wanted to catch some of the drama. To give it context, I needed a couple of the Fanny packs with the word, Tribe, on them to show in the picture. That was not going to happen. I do not blame myself for the miss. I stayed with it. It just did not happen. The conundrum is whether I can piece a couple of the pictures together to tell the story. I did miss getting a picture of the grand finale. The group took off leaving the girl with the injured leg and her friend who had been especially attentive. By golly, they decided to catch up with the friend pushing the cart and its passenger, full speed ahead. There was absolutely no way for me to anticipate that. They were gone before I could raise my camera.
I almost never go into the city a second time on the weekend. These days I have fewer mandatory activities, which is a blessing, so I can spurge on my photography passion. Plus, it was partly cloudy. That is a big help getting the right exposure. It was also noticeably cooler. Off I go, with high hopes.
Midway through the photo walk, the photography gods smiled. I could not believe it, but my “Tribe” Girl Squad was back and once again, living large. Before they moved on, I took some pictures. But the real photography god’s smile, maybe even a bit of a laugh, occurred when I encountered them again. This time, we mutually recognized each other and started to chat. These ladies are all from Philadelphia, except for one friend who had moved to Portland. She is the one who had a tiff with the bride yesterday. They have been friends for 25 years, since they were 5 years old. I reckon they have figured how to work things out. Philadelphia gave me a sly point of connection. I told them I graduated from a high school they probably had never heard of. No doubt they were thinking, “That is the truth.” But it was Cherry Hill High School in N.J., which is generally known to everyone in the area. We reminisced. One of the Tribe had managed a store in the Cherry Hill mall for years. That mall was two years new when I moved to the township in 1963. It was where I got my first job.
I talked to the bride for a while. I told her I had not ever seen Fanny packs as the connector. She quickly assured me that each one of them had one, but she had told them, above all, be yourself. It was a group value that was easy for me to see, even as an outsider.
I am a southern girl by birth and certainly by how I was raised. The lion’s share of my life was spent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our cultural practices can be quite different from the “putting it all out there” that is more common, by my perception, of girls raised in the north. It was quite the treat to revisit that individualism for a little time on Broadway.
A new gallery, Legs, has been added. It reflects the whimsical side of my photography. Please check it out, it will only take a minute or so.