Marine Corps Historic Half in FXBG

I suppose it is fair to say it may have been a half  marathon but a full dose of frustration.  Aside from getting up before five, I was looking at 100% chance of rain and a course not easily navigated due to road closures. I made sure to bring rain gear for the cameras which usually works pretty well but makes it slightly more cumbersome. But like the marines, the news photographer’s mantra should be ‘adapt and overcome.’ We had 5 people out there shooting and thought we had a pretty good coverage plan. Sadly the rain took its toll on some colleagues’ gear though I lucked out and despite being soaked, the cameras survived!  My major gripe of the day was that according to one of our reporters, the race organizers would not release the registration lists with names and bib numbers, only the results list with those that FINISHED the race. This was problematic as 3 out of the 5 photogs could not locate people in the results meaning that they did not finish or their race tags did not work. Thus a few good pictures could not go in the paper because we could not ID the runners. The Marines apparently said they were packed up for the day but would be happy to help us on Monday. We are a DAILY newspaper,  that does us no good. Marine Corps fail! Anyway, all in all it was an unpleasant day though I think the paper’s coverage was solid. Plus we conducted a brief review afterwards and came up with a plan that will help us improve coverage of not only the marathon but events of similar size and scope like the SoapBox Derby

Here are a few pictures – I only cropped and resized as my trusty Mac bit the dust the other day. I’m hoping the IT folks can salvage the images that were on there. In the meantime I’m using my little Lenovo netbook. It is handy to have in the field but not great for major image crunching!

Check out FL-S coverage including Becky Sell’s pre-race portraits series. Good stuff!