Hoo-ray! It's over!

The DC/Baltimore/NOVA Strobist group's shoot at the Frederick Key's stadium in Frederick, MD is over with. What a disappointment...


All the attendees were great and it was a perfect day out. I even managed to get two good pictures that day and two out of about twelve models that said they were going to attend actually showed up. What a let down. We had about 15-20 photographers from the group there and most of us spent the day either trying to squeeze in a shot with one of the two models or sitting around and doing much of nothing.

There was plenty of twiddling with gear, photographing setups, photographing surroundings, and wishing some one would show up for us to take pictures of. All in all, we did the best we could with as bad a situation as we were delt. Adam Pohl, the Keys' PR guy was great as well. He was the man who allowed us to do this shoot and accomodated us with several jerseys and access to the stadium with no one there but the cleaning crews.

The above photo is one of two that I managed to get. It's not my favorite, but John Miliker's arm wasn't blocking the Keys logo on the jersey like in the other one. I know I have at least one floating around of me sprawled out over several seats in the stadium like a bum.

So, back to the root of all evil... I was even supposed to have one girl, that I was told had previous modeling experience, meet me in Shepherdstown at 9:00AM. I told her I had to be in Frederick by 9:30, so I would be cutting it close. OK. 9:05 rolls around and she calls. Great. After getting off the phone I learn that she's just woke up...she even asked if there was a certain time I had to be there by *smack's forehead*. She told me she was going to rush so I said that's ok (what else was I going to do?. I called a friend of mine that was heading to the meet to let him know I was going to be late and delegated responsibilities (Thanks Jeff).

Sooooo....






......Twenty minutes later I get another phone call. Apparently she still wasn't ready and didn't feel comfortable going and was cancelling (?!?!?!?!). I mean, really...I'm sure she knew from the moment she woke up late that she wasn't going. Thanks for making me wait twenty minutes for you to make up your mind...

Anyways, I made it to the meet later, angry, and well angry. Of course I got over it. I mean, it wasn't the any of the models' fault that they're generally unreliable and undependable and that us photographers are generally at their mercy to trust them. After all, we're not the ones that that want to do something in name only. Man, I'm cynical.

Well a good ending to the day was fried chicken at Cindy Dee's, right on the border of MD & VA (that's not the best fried chicken I've ever had though...). There we figured out that the only reliable model is a paid model. It seems that un experienced models tend to say they want to model but never make it farther than in front of their own P&S cameras. I'd really not be in such a model bashing mood and it would probably be right of whom ever reads this to say, "Well one experience isn't a good way to judge by" and I'd tend to agree and say, "But of course, but the third or fourth experience is showing a trend here."

I think I'm taking a break from arrange these meets to focus on doing the photography thing for myself. I'll be keeping an eye peeled for venues of course, but it's pointless to try for bigger and better things when we have very limited capacity to function in the smaller meet ups due to things out of our control. Besides, that was way too much hassle and headache for two photos.