It’s hard to put in words what it was like to cover yesterday’s Inauguration. It was at the same time awesome and a pain in the ass. 🙂 It’s probably easier if I just walk you through the day.
Most of us slept over at the Times the night before because we knew it would almost be impossible to get anywhere on Inauguration day. The bridges were being shut from Virginia into D.C. and traffic and the Metro were supposed to be INSANE.
Joe Eddins (our Chief Photographer) and I got up at 3:30 a.m. and were ferried over to the Capitol (or as close as we could get) by our editors at 4 a.m. After a lengthy walk and waiting to get through security we were in position around 4:30 a.m. It was funny when we all started doing the mental math that we now had to just stand here for around 7 hours before anything started. I remember looking and seeing that the air temp was around 17 degrees and that didn’t include the wind that would kick up.
I was on the Balustrade position (bal?us?trade [bal–uh-streyd, bal-uh–streyd] –noun- a railing with supporting balusters) which is just above and behind where Obama would get sworn-in. The Capitol people marked our positions and I was lucky enough to get the surprise of being behind a huge lamp post. 🙁 That’s why we get there early I guess — need to work that out. In the end, it worked out just fine. To my right was Time and Newsweek.
At the end, Vincent Laforet who was shooting next to me for Time magazine got a photo of me:
It was a cold day but definitely worth it.
The hard part was leaving. My bags weighed in at 86 pounds which felt like 186 pounds by the end. It was over a mile walk back to the car with all of that through a sea of people to drop it off. Not fun by any means (especially the 100 yard up-ramp at the end).
For any photo geeks out there who wants to know about equipment brought:
Camera Bodies:
2 – Nikon D3’s / 3 – Nikon D200’s
Lenses:
300mm f2.8 / 70-200 f2.8 / 24-70mm f2.8 / 17-55mm f2.8 / 85mm f1.4 / 50mm f1.4 / 24mm tilt-shift / 45mm tilt-shift / teleconverters
Misc.:
cold weather gear / box of hand warmers / camera rain coats / two OverExposed camera plates / clamps / magic arms / Pocket Wizard radio remotes / remote cables / batteries / batteries / more batteries (and chargers) / 74 GB of compact flash cards / laptop / card readers / power strips / step stool / hard drives
I’m sure there was more but I just can’t remember it right now (a bit sore and still very tired).
In an age when my “Where Were You When” moments all involve tragedies like shuttle explosions, Oklahoma City bombings and 9-11-01, it was nice to have a good memory like this. I couldn’t have been in a better position to take it all in — very lucky.