Why is it that I always seem to finish photo set projects at two in the morning?
March 1, 2009, 2:49 AM
Yep… it’s almost 3 AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning, and in the last hour or so, I finally finished Midnight March, which is about a protest against the World Bank and IMF during their fall 2008 meetings.
This set was more challenging than most protest sets I’ve shot. I’ve done plenty of protest marches before, both in daylight, as well as at night. I believe my most recent nighttime protest photo before that one was October Rebellion, specifically the Georgetown march. That was shot in some of the worst weather conditions that I had ever experienced during a protest march. After all, it was raining hard, and it was cold. Plus everyone was on edge due to the way that march was promoted. But for Midnight March, I had the weather on my side, as the skies were completely clear. And it was only slightly cool outside, much to my delight. Very comfortable protest weather. But the camera was something of an unknown quantity. I had barely done any shooting at night with the Kodak, with most of the nighttime shooting consisting of two Anon raids, and a day out with Katie. And all those were cases where I could carefully line up my shots. Can’t do that at a protest march, unfortunately. You have to go with the flow and keep up with the crowd.
And I think that the photos, unfortunately, look like I wasn’t used to dealing with the camera I was using. They look a little rough, and I had trouble getting a sharp focus and not motion-blurring the pictures. Basically, every time I went one way, the Kodak decided it was going the other, and in short, things didn’t go too well. I was pretty heavy with the image processing on a number of the photos in order to compensate, and I think you can tell on some of those shots. I think that the movies came out better than the photos did, mainly because while the photos were kind of all over the place, the camera had to calm down and lock some features to shoot a movie, and thus I got more consistency there as far as everything went.
Then of course, Midnight March is the first to be released with the “lightbox” feature on the photos. That looks pretty cool, if you ask me, though I still need to tweak the lightbox feature’s settings a little bit more to make it look exactly like I want.
So there you go, I suppose. This photo set won’t go down as one of the greatest in my portfolio, but the march that was being covered was certainly one of the more fun ones that I’ve attended.
Web site: Midnight March
Song: The sound of pots and pans being struck at about as late in the evening as I'm writing this.
Quote: And I met my goal: I told people I was going to finish a photo set this weekend, and by golly, I did.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta, World Bank