Sunday, November 23, 2008

2008 MTN Kampala Marathon, Uganda

6 comments:

  1. so the marathon was today. really it should be called the 10k because about 40 people run the marathon and many thousands run the 10k.

    there was some sun, which made for nice light - most of the action took place between 7am and 9am.

    i made exactly the same mistake i made last year at the finish. i forgot to shift from single-shot focus to ai servo focus which meant that only my first image of every burst was in focus. so i missed a lot of the classic finishing images before i caught it. arg. always a learning experience.

    shooting the marathon here in kampala is an exercise in capturing the context around the action. given the crowds and lack of logistics, getting a pure action shot (number 12) doesn't happen much. but the craziness of the surroundings and the mass of yellow humanity has lots of photogenic-ness.

    note photo 20. what looks like a crowded, disorganized african street is actually the final 200m stretch of the marathon. you can see the winner in the blurry distance. red singlet, yellow bib, his hand reaches in to the center of the bib. this is what i mean about not trying to get the standard action shot...those photo ops are that so carefully scripted for the race finishes. this scene would be unrecognizable for most US sports photogs.

    so it's my first attempt at embedding a photoshelter slideshow in to the blog. you'll probably be able to see it before i do, because the images are too big.

    i like the idea of it (a slideshow), but i'm not totally into it, maybe because most of my photo career i've lived with dial-up speed internet access. i don't really know how to use photoshelter, but i will reload the gallery once i can figure out how to get rid of the copyright watermarks.

    i'm also noticing that slideshows might be better all horizontal or all vertical, not a mix.

    thanks for checking in!

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  2. The slideshow was great from where I sit, Phil. The shots just fit the screen when I used F11 to take Firefox full screen. I agree that the switch between horizontal and vertical can be disconcerting. Personally I don't like the vertical format, but some shots just require it.

    My only question is how did you miss taking any shots of Odin??? On his Facebook page he says he was in the marathon!

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  3. well i know by now you've seen paige's odin is a cow post over at andersonbowen.comBLOG and the last photo is of odin at the race today.

    good news is i've figured out the copyright watermark thing, but still have one in the bottom left corner. if you loaded the slideshow when there was still the obnoxious "copyright phil bowen" across the center, empty your cache and refresh/reload to see the photos a bit cleaner.

    awesome.

    ReplyDelete
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