Christmas in Seattle

Working in a retail-adjacent role kinda makes the holiday season just a trip through the motions as Mariah Carey makes another .003 cents every hour on the hour, but the magic of the season was rekindled in Seattle. Something about seeing fake snow fall while sipping a latte really got my inner kid smiling.

Pike Place Market tree lighting

I was just doing some sightseeing at Pike Place Market after visiting the original Starbucks store and did the natural thing of following the sound of a Pink Pony Club cover. It turned out that I walked straight into the market's tree lighting with a cover band performing holiday hits (Pink Pony Club is now a confirmed holiday anthem, I don't make the rules), a Santa sighting, and fake snow flying about. The scene was straight out of a snow globe.

I'm still trying to dial in my night photography setup so there were many outages that turned out being out of focus (though I think I fixed a few of those issues later in the trip) with my 50mm f/1.8 lens (when ends up being a 75mm equivalent on my Sony a6400). I really need to look into grabbing a wider prime to have a more ideal (and hopefully smaller) run and gun setup but I do appreciate having the extra reach when shooting in event crowds like this (the 24mm f/2.8 is on my wishlist).

I did love these closeups that spoke to the whimsy and magic of the evening.

Snowflake Lane

Across Lake Washington, the Bellevue Collection's Snowflake Lane really put me in the holiday spirit. It's a nightly parade between Black Friday and Christmas Eve that features the usual Christmas characters, festive music, and a shower of fake snow that could warm even the coldest of hearts.

The parade has an interesting structure in that it loops around a four block radius to ensure that every spectator gets a good view of every aspect of the parade.

My friend Gaeb invited me to tag along to seeing the parade relatively last minute so I didn't have much of an idea of what to expect but once I arrived the anchoring thought I had was to capture the whimsy and joy from a child's perspective. There were so many families there and I felt like it was a good exercise that helped me unlock my inner child in experiencing the parade.