"Sen. Barack Obama address a crowd of more than 9,000 people Wednesday, January 30 inside Magness Arena on the University of Denver campus. Overflow crows totaling another 5,000 people filled the adjacent Hamilton Gymnasium and Peter Barton Lacrosse Stadium."
The Obama show came to town today and man was it wild. I've never experienced something so electric, especially on campus. I had a press credential and thank god that I did. I made it to the Ritchie Center around 7:30am and made my way to the press entrance on the south side of the building. There seemed to be a lot of people at the entrance for them all to be members of the press. I didn't see that many people with cameras or notebooks so I assumed that they were volunteers. I was right and they were at the wrong entrance. Someone had misinformed them and they were directed back outside to the west entrance. One agitated elderly gentleman asked the tall, muscular suit bearing man behind the gate "who are you?" To which he responded with "I'm secret service, who are you?" All of the actual press couldn't help but laugh.
After a few minutes we were all let inside and I made my way down to the floor. My buddy Brandon Iwamoto and some of his co-workers from The Collegian came down to cover the event and I talked with them for a few minutes. After some discussion of about Brandon's remote set-up and the appropriate white balance, which we decided was 4500K, I walked around to set up in front of the television risers so that I could have a direct line to the podium.
I'll spare you all the boring stuff. Several people spoke for what seemed like forever. The seemed to be stalling because the security checkpoints were taking forever and thousands of people were being directed into Hamilton Gymnasium and on to the lacrosse field as overflow. Barack spoke to both groups prior to making his way into Magness Arena which meant that his projected start time was pushed back from 9am to about 11am. Caroline Kennedy spoke immediately prior to Obama taking the stage.
When he did make his entrance the crowd went absolutely nuts. From the moment he stepped into Magness I didn't take my camera away from my face. I made roughly 500 frames during the course of his speech. I will admit that a lot of the frames are very similar as I'm trying to catch him with the perfect expression. With cameras that shoot 5 and 8 frames per second respectively you can see how my image total can get up there pretty quickly. I made dozens of different images and you can see my selects HERE!!!
He had some excellent things to say and while I'm not going to concede my vote this early in the process I did like what I heard today.
I made some great images but the best part was being able to check out the slideshows from the Post and Rocky photogs to compare what images I made to theirs. Long story short, I'm doing much better but I still have a lot to learn.
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I'm sure that many of you are wondering what is going on with the whole issue at The Clarion. Today was another crazy day in which I received several more emails. The National Press Photographers Association has somehow gotten involved and the president of the organization called the University to talk with several high ranking officials about the issue. I had the pleasure of speaking with the Chair of the Department of Mass Communications and Journalism this evening and she was very understanding and helpful. Hopefully the situation will begin to mend it's self tomorrow as things move forward. I'm supposed to get a call from the NPPA President tomorrow so I will let you know how that goes.
The commute tomorrow morning in the snow is probably going to take longer than expected so I'm going to get to bed and try to get an early start to my day. Stay tuned!
-JCE
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