On Assignment: Martin County, FL

If you're rubbing your eyes about now at why something seems a bit different at Drinking with a Dead Man, you can stop. Something is different. And shit, there is even a RSS feed in the house! That's right, the blog has been revamped and moved into the 21st century with some amazing help from an extremely talented friend and Movable Type. Thank you, thank you, and thank you again. You'll now have a much easier time finding old posts in the archive (not sure that's a good thing), and also be more able to join the conversation using the comments (definitely bad).

Well, it was inevitable, someone at The New York Times read my last post. They haven't said anything, but I know they saw it from my site stats (they are regulars). So far there is nothing to report, and I'm pretty sure there will never be any drama. On the one hand my own self righteousness in that evaluation makes me pretty ill, but on the other I really think I was fair and, yep I'll say it, balanced. And thanks for all of the e-mail from those of you who have agreed. And speaking of all things NYT... here is the recap of my election coverage of the Negron/Mahoney race.

Bored after waiting for over 3 hours for Congressional candidate Joe Negron to greet his crowd of supporters on election night in Hutchinson Island, FL, 10-year old Heather Carroll, of Hobe Sound, distracts herself by playing with her cell phone while perched on the front of the stage.

I was already interested in the 16th Congressional district election before I got a call from the Times last week. It's an easy "yes" -- you got a Republican sex scandal which forces a family values line-toer to resign in disgrace, which then forces the national GOP troops to find a new squeaky clean home town guy just 5 weeks before election day to face off against a first-time Democratic candidate, and a week before election day the race is nearly a dead heat. When my editor told me that I'd be heading to Stuart I also had cause to be excited because a good friend of mine from college works for the paper there and I knew that he had already started a project on Joe Negron. What could be better than working on a great story with a good friend?

Unfortunately, all of that excitement started to melt away as soon as I met Joe Negron. Joe is actually less animated than Al Gore. That's right, less. He doesn't make eye contact, he constantly looks away from the people in an uncomfortable way, and he blinks at all the wrong times. This guy is made of wood. He also struck me as a really nice, straight-forward, and honest candidate, but that doesn't translate into my photography, and so for the first half of my day on Tuesday I was in pretty bad shape. OK, so the candidate isn't that media friendly or savvy, no big deal, I thought; it'll just take me a little longer to get some good stuff of him. Ouch, strike two. Negron's official schedule for election day only had 2 events on it... one at 9 a.m., and his trip to the polls with his family at 11 a.m. That's it. His media people assured me that he was spending the rest of the day holed away and was not interested in any media tagging along. Uhhh... and so by lunchtime I was worried about what I was going to be able to provide for my client, especially because press is not allowed to come within 100 feet of a voting center in Martin County.

After lunch I got a break and found out that Negron was actually heading out to each polling station that he could to deliver snacks and bottled water to volunteers. This is one of Joe's traditions, which is great, but I was pretty shocked to hear that he was still doing it in the afternoon. When I left him in mid-morning to file my first set of pictures he was driving around passing out water. And hours later when I caught back up with him at 5 p.m. he was still at it. I'm not sure how I would spend an election day if I was ever insane enough to run for something, but I'm not sure it would be spending 6 hours making sure there wasn't a single thirsty person in all of Martin County. The good part about Joe's tradition was that by the late afternoon everyone else had lost interest in his quest, and as I followed him from voting center to voting center it was just the two of us. No campaign people, no other members of the media. Me, Joe, and hundreds of bottles of water and Nutri Grain bars (in strawberry or blueberry). It was a beautiful rainy afternoon for the two of us, until at one stop when I became so excited that Joe was actually smiling and animated talking with supporters that I didn't notice I was crouching down in a giant ant hill. I still didn't notice until I got in my car to follow Negron to the next stop and tried to not run into other cars while killing the hundred or so ants running into my jeans.

Fast-forward into the evening and the election night party for the Republican candidate at the Hutchinson Island Marriott (posh). I got there 20 minutes early (after stopping to file my pictures for the second of 5 times on the night that the NYT had demanded that I do so) and found the ballroom already humming with journalists and camera crews getting ready. I plopped down my laptop on a table right off the ballroom floor which was so close that I could have easily shot his upcoming speech from my chair if I was another type of photographer. As soon as I booted up my computer the free wireless network came right up, and my buddy Matt arrived just after me to take one of the last laptop spots right next to me. We were in business. Then the waiting started.

Now I haven't covered an election in some time. I'm not even sure how long its been, but I had forgotten how fucking long you have to wait for something, anything to happen. I arrived 90 minutes before the candidate was supposed to arrive (8 p.m.) and greet his supporters, but by 10:30 (well past my last A1 deadline) there was still no sign of Joe Negron. The hours were passed with a lot of bullshitting, flash tests (its been acting up, and I almost never use it anyway), and watching the AP guy accost the head press manager for the campaign every 15 minutes for an update. Working with Matt I thought a lot about how much I do miss the community aspect of shooting for newspapers and getting to know your colleagues over time. I also thought a bit about how incredibly useful zoom lenses are for political events. I did just fine with my primes (I think I shot the whole night with only the 28 and 50), but I was definitely a bit behind everyone else in tight situations.

At long last, and well after most of the crowd had gone home, there was an announcement that Joe was going to take the stage in just a couple of minutes. The happy band of still shooters all made our knot right at the front of the stage (which situated at too high of an angle for us to get a nice clean background from down in front; fucking broadcast journalism), and as I tried to cover yet another yawn (I woke up early to drive the 2.5 hours up to Stuart from Miami) I began to panic. What I mean is that I began to feel light headed right there standing front and center before the press and few hundred Negron fans, and because I knew what feeling light headed was going to mean (I was 30 second away from blacking out) I started to panic. Three times in the last 6 years, due to a combination of stress, lack of sleep, not eating, being dehydrated, and sometimes being in crowds, I've fainted. Once was really good, as I flat out dropped to the floor in the middle of a packed concert, scaring the shit out of my buddy Scott (who wasn't so upset that he didn't leave me for a few minutes, after I had come to and been taken care of with some water, to get the lead singer of Azure Ray's phone number... it was unsuccessful I think).

The panic in this case was 2-fold. On the one hand I didn't want to faint in the middle of the photo pool and crowd, fall down on someone most likely, and snap back up very embarrassed. On the other, and what was making me far more upset, I really didn't want to risk missing Negron's entrance and speech. I really only had one course of action... I turned around, left my prime spot in front, and waded through the crowd towards the back of the room where there was a banquet of refreshments. I grabbed a bottle water, gulped it down in 2 sips and then just about dunked my head in the cold ice water that the bottles were sitting in. After repeating the dunking for bottled water trick twice more I grabbed a big piece of melon, gobbled that up, dried off my face, and concentrated on a few deep breaths (its amazing how we forget to breath sometimes). 45 seconds after I felt very close to fainting I was almost completely fine, and went straight back into the fire. Negron entered 60 seconds after that and I didn't miss a single thing.

So much of shooting politics is the luck of which position that you are assigned or choose for yourself. That night I guessed well enough to catch this little thing that Joe did with his tongue right after announcing that he was conceding the race to his opponent. He then hugged his wife and closed his eyes (my friend Matt was blocked by the podium and got the stinky end of that stick) and I redeemed my boring photography of most of the day with a very strong final take. 2 minutes after the end of Negron's speech I was at my laptop editing through the files. Right before the speech I had the idea of switching to JPEG instead of RAW files so that I wouldn't have any problems with buffer during what I thought would probably be a very short delivery, and that ended up being a really good idea. Not only was I able to shoot very quickly but it cut down my editing time significantly and I had my 5th take off to the NYT more than 45 minutes before my final, final deadline.

The following day I woke up early after very little sleep and one too many bourbons (after election drink with the gang) in my great uncle's beach condo on Hutchinson Island. My plan was to take a quick shower and then meet up ASAP with the winner of the previous night's congressional race, Democrat Tim Mahoney, and document his victory lap also for the Times. I was moving pretty sluggishly and so it took me about 30 seconds of staring at the shower head to figure out what was wrong. There wasn't any water. I traced what I thought was supposed to work with my eyes... lever up, over to hot water, up to shower head... no water. I then went to the bathroom sink. No water. Kitchen, nope. A foggy thought began to emerge that my family turns off the main water supply to the apartment each time they leave. No problem... I'll just turn it back on. 15 minutes later I still had no idea where the water was turned on from. I found breaker boxes and water heaters... but I was stumped. So, because I thought it wise to spare the world "un-washed John" for the remainder of the day, I decided on an alternative, and quickly jumped into my bathing suit and grabbed a bar of soap, and headed for the pool where I was sure I would find an ocean rinse off shower. I was right about the shower, but wrong about the gamble that there wouldn't be anyone else out early in the morning to witness my ridiculous dance. There was.

The rest of today's work was pretty standard and not worth detailing. I eventually met up with Tim at his headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens. He was so exhausted by the campaign and late night that instead of a "victory lap" all he had planned was a few hours in his office taking care of some immediate business (a few hundred phone calls to media and supporters). After 2 hours I had worked the situation in just about every way that I could, none of which made for interesting images, and then got back on I-95 to head home. What a special gift I was for my girlfriend when I arrived: a partially unshowered freelance photographer with a couple dozen ant bites all over his legs and a giant grin on his face after 2 hours of NPR coverage of the Democrat's day in the sun.

« Go to previous entry | Home | Go to next entry »

© 2006-2008 John Loomis. All Rights Reserved.