Saturday I got the chance to hobble around with a cane and a 400mm lens at Tufts, shooting sports for their parents weekend matchups. The idea was to take advantage of a schedule that overlapped field hockey, soccer, and football.
Threats of rain never materialized, but the weather mentality prepared me for Murphy’s Law of Photojournalism , which typically attacks battery issues. Anticipating a bad cell for my primary camera, I went out and bought a brand new battery and set it charging in the morning before the assignment.
Halfway through my first of three sports, my premonitions came true as my main battery began to fail. I reached for my brand new battery only to realize I left it on the charger in my rush to get to Medford. I wrestled with the dying cell using all my tricks to suck the final watts out of the thing, but I was forced to move to my backup camera. Realizing this would not do to shoot the rest of the jobs, I finished out the field hockey game and booked it back to my office in Boston to collect the now fully charged new battery.
I made it back to Tufts as the first half of the football game was ending and the soccer team was getting ready to take the field next door, so I settled in to shoot the first half of the soccer game, while keeping an ear to the action on the football field. After getting the necessary soccer shots, I moved as quickly as I could over to the football field for the last few minutes of the third quarter.
The Tufts offense was having a hard time making progress, and their defense wasn’t holding up too well against the Trinity attack, which was making my job a little frustrating, since the University was the client. Fortunately the quarterback saw fit to air out a 40-something yard pass to a receiver on the far side of the field from me, which was essentially the best play of the half, and even offered a glimmer of hope to an otherwise bummer of a game for the Jumbos.
Having made up my lost time with the end of the football game, I packed it up and headed home glad to be a photog.
