Everyone Was Photographing the Airstream
The photo I loved most was the one I found when I walked away.
This wasn’t my first photography conference. But just like everyone else there, I felt the pressure to get the perfect shot taken, edited, and posted to social media as quickly as possible.
Years ago when I attended my first conference, I naively assumed we would break into workshops and styled shoots and each be given an orderly, one-at-a-time turn to learn the new skill or take our shot.
I was wrong.
It didn't matter that we had each spent thousands of dollars to be there. When it came time to “get the shot,” it was as if a piñata had just busted open and a gaggle of five-year-olds were rushing to grab as much candy as they could before anyone else could.
There was no standing in line. You had to push your way to the front, kneel down, get your shot, and hope you and your very expensive camera equipment weren't crushed by the people behind you.
Now I’m not big on this kind of pushing frenzy. I want a line. At my local coffee shop in Portland, you’re supposed to form the line to the side, not straight out the door where the rain blows in.
It displeases me greatly when new people show up and don’t realize that. I have to resist the urge to say, “Don’t stand there with the door open!” Instead, I try to communicate via body language that they need to move over while also making sure no one cuts in front of me.
Yes, I was often assigned the role of Line Leader in elementary school. Can you tell?
Over the years of attending these photography conferences, I reluctantly learned to be a bit more aggressive to get my shot, get it edited, posted to social media, and tagged with the appropriate people. I thought I was playing the game fairly well.
Then I discovered that this group in San Diego had changed the rules.
Yes, they were all still posting the workshop shots but it was as if that had become just a prerequisite. Now the most aggressive attendees were wandering the grounds of the event venue and getting shots outside the workshops. One-off images that didn’t look like the same photo 20 people in a workshop had taken.
Each morning before the keynote session, we’d all stand in line at an Airstream trailer that served coffee in the morning and tacos at lunch. Palm trees and birds-of-paradise in the background. A full-length surf board to the side.
Early one morning, an attendee had managed to snap a photo of this scene before it was crowded with people…when the morning sun filtered through the palm trees and lit up the Airstream in the most beautiful, retro, film-like shot.
Posted to social media before most of us were even awake, it became the defining image of the conference.
After that, everyone crowded around the Airstream trying to get their version of it. I took a few myself but I knew deep inside that no one could outdo that first one.
Eventually it started to irk me watching people crowd around the Airstream trying to “get the shot.” One afternoon I walked away from the whole group in protest of the ridiculousness of it all.
I wandered off to Mission Bay. To Pacific Beach. I was shooting my medium format film camera and still familiarizing myself with the settings. At roughly $3 a frame in development fees, I'd learned to be selective about what I shot. Not much caught my eye. The sun was too high. There were too many people.
Walking back to the venue, I stopped again at Mission Bay. The sun was just starting to dip in the sky and cast a pink glow across the clouds above the water. I raised the camera to my eye, peered through the viewfinder and thought, it looks like a painting. I pressed the shutter and waited for the whirr to finish as the film advanced. Then I turned and walked back to the hotel.
When you shoot on medium format film, there’s no 24-hour turnaround. You send it off to one of a handful of labs around the country and wait, sometimes a month, to see what you got.
I had mostly forgotten about the Airstream feeding frenzy by the time my film images arrived. But as I flipped through them, I hoped there would be at least one worth the effort.
When I pulled up that last photo I took at Mission Bay, I just stared at it.
The pink sky.
The way the sailboats were spaced on the water.
Their sails all rolled up like they were tucked in for bed.
It really did look like a painting.
And I realized something in that moment.
Not everything meant for everyone else is meant for me.
I think about that sometimes when I’m scrolling through Instagram or LinkedIn and it feels like everyone is chasing the same thing.
Sometimes the most meaningful work, or even the most meaningful life, happens when you step away from the crowd and follow what quietly catches your own eye.
At that conference, while everyone else was crowding around the Airstream trying to recreate the same photo, the image I loved most was the one I found when I walked away.
So if you, like me, feel called to something a little different, keep going.
Cheers,
Carrie
PS: In case you were curious…yes, all of the photography in these newsletters is my own. Created by me, not by AI in any fashion. :)