Responsibility to Participate

(I meant to get these posted sooner, but I've been swamped with video work over the past few days in addition to nursing a cold I caught on the airplane on the way back from Vegas.)

Today marks the first election in history that I've actually cared about, and the first where I'm making it a point to (or felt that I have a responsibility to) participate. So many bad things have happened in this country in the past eight years. I really think its time we get somebody in office with a fresh outlook on things, someone who is in touch with what the majority of the country is concerned about.

On a totally unrelated note (do you guys dig my sarcastic transition?), here are some photos I shot last Friday at Barack Obama's campaign stop and speech at Wicker Memorial Park in Highland, Indiana. They say up to 40,000 people attended the event, and it seemed like everyone and their mamma was there that I knew. I saw a lot of faces from high school that I haven't seen in quite a while, so that was cool. And, of course, I got to see Barack for the first time, and I was definitely star struck. That doesn't happen to me too often, there are few people I idolize or look up to in the media. But, after watching Barack over the past few months, it was cool to photograph him and get within ten feet of who may very well be the next president of the United States.

A sea of people listen to Obama's speech at Wicker Memorial Park in Highland, Ind., last Friday.

The media was almost totally separated from the general attendees at the rally (I think the Obama campaign wanted that way), so I had to get resourceful to get any crowd shots at all. And, once Obama got there, it became a game of sorts to see how many different ways I could photograph the same person within a fifteen minute time span (although Barack's speech lasted 30 minutes, I spent the first 15 waiting for access to the "buffer", the area immediately in front of the podium that secret service officers usher us into four at a time for three minutes per group).

One of my favorite shots was one I got with a larger version of my now famous pole cam I previously wrote about in one of my Talladega entries. Instead of using a monopod, I mounted a 1D MarkII atop my Gitzo microphone boom, allowing me to get the camera around fifteen feet above my head from wherever I wanted. I used my 550EX flash on the camera's hot shoe up top to fill in the crowd immediately in front of me. I again used Pocketwizards to trigger the camera from below. The Post-Tribune ran one of my pole cam shots on the front page (see the clip at the bottom of this entry).

The view from the pole cam.

I'm attending Barack's rally in downtown Chicago later tonight, so stay tuned here for more election photos soon! For now, here are a few more from the Highland rally: