Pike Place Market Buskers

At the end of summer the Pike Place Market folks put in a festival to show off all the great buskers* to perform daily at the market.

September 18, 2011 was the date of the latest festival. It had been a few years since I was able to make it to the festival, and as usual, I found a number of really wonderful performers, some of them completely new to me (such as Jobo Shakins). Here are a few of the images I made at the festival. You can see many of these performers year-round at the Market. If you run across them, please drop some money in their hats to help support this great tradition.

Jobo Shakins from Portland

Gloria Darlings

Morrison Boomer

Dre

Dave McKesson

Some folks, though, perform for free...

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*Busker: street performer working for gratuities

Getting ready to LIghten Up and Shoot

Andy and Mikey from Lighten Up and Shoot are in town (Seattle) this week getting ready for a 3-day free online workshop at CreativeLIVE on Fri, Sat, and Sun.

Yesterday and today have been two of those perfect days in Seattle and we went around to people we found on Craig's List, some garage sales, and some thrift stores to start picking up inexpensive and free props for use in the workshop. The idea is to show folks that you don't need to spend a lot of money to build a set for your photographs.

Negotiating to purchase an organ

After dropping off some of our treasure at CreativeLIVE we headed out to a wonderful dinner at The Skillet restaurant. You might remember their food truck from the Penny De Los Santos workshop.

Andy, Craig, and Mikey outside the CreativeLIVE studio

From there we regrouped and did some prop "shopping" in my basement, and then headed out to a wonderful dinner at The Skillet diner. You might remember the Skillet food truck that was part of the Penny De Los Santos weekend a couple of months ago.

After that we visited the Photo Center Northwest's 24-Hour Long Shot celebration to finish up a long day.

Mikey gets photographed with a
tiny Rollieflex digital camera

And turns around to take a portrait of the camera

I happend to look down as we were standing around
talking outside the Photo Center

Always nice to run into Tonja Gabryshak

 

Andy, Susan, Kim, and Mikey

On Sunday morning, I headed out to the Ballard Farmer's Market to photograph some people on the street.

Buskers at the Ballard Farmer's Market

This guy was an amazing slide guitarist.
Great tone and style. I tossed some money
in the hat, but totally forgot to find out
more about him.