Most of you who know me, know that I am not a huge fan of baseball. Don’t get me wrong — I can sit in the stands on a nice day with a cold beer and hotdog and enjoy the heck out of myself.
My problem with baseball is that 99% of the time, I am not sitting in the stands with a beer and hotdog! Instead, I am in a dugout trying to overcome my short attention span to make sure a foul ball doesn’t screw up my hairdo and get the one photograph of something happening during the game. The shooters who love baseball and play baseball have a much easier time because they recognize the subtle shifts in a game and can start watching something develop before it happens. Let’s just say that I’m not that person!
Last week was Opening Day so Peter and I headed out to Nationals Park. After having to explain to the parking attendant that we actually did work for The Washington Times and that the people who told him earlier in the day that they did lied to him, we got 2 of the last spaces in the media lot.
We split it up so Peter shot most of the game action and I roamed the stands looking for features.
In the end, the Nats lost, I didn’t get to drink a beer in the stands but I didn’t get beaned in the head so we will call it even. 🙂
The last photo was taken right after Abe Lincoln won the Running Presidents race. He decided it would be cute to do a LeBron James and put baby powder on his hands and slap it together to celebrate. The problem was that the idiot (no offense to the real Abe) decided to do it right over our photo pit and I took the brunt of the baby powder. I’m a good sport about a lot of things but I seriously wanted to do bodily harm to someone at that point. If any of us had been changing lenses at that moment, our cameras would probably have had to be sent back to Nikon for a professional cleaning to get it all off the sensor. And if that would have been the case, there would have been a really funny Sports Center highlight of photographers jumping out of the first base pit attacking a big-headed-former-President.