David Higginbotham Photography, The Blog

Tomorrow Decatur will host it’s first ever dragon boat race.  The Dragon Boat Race and Festival, a charity fundraiser to help Decatur General Hospital purchase a $2 million radiation-therapy device for its oncology department, will feature races by sponsor teams who will paddle power the 46 foot long boats for 250 meters.  That’s about 820 feet.  Why do some of you feel like you must use the metric system?  I guess I shouldn’t judge though until I’ve walked a kilometer in your shoes.

I’m photographing the event for possible inclusion in the book “More Than A River” that I’ve been working on for the Decatur-Morgan County Chamber of Commerce.  I’ll be at the actual event tomorrow but today I wanted to go and shoot a few photos at practice.  I shot images with my normal cameras but also used a GoPro HD Hero 2 camera mounted on the side of the boat with a suction cup.  The camera was set to take 2 photos per second and was mounted just out of reach (or so I thought) of the first paddler.

Please note the look of confidence on my face as I check to make sure the camera is firing.

After looking at the images later I quickly realized that I hadn’t aimed the camera very well.  The camera doesn’t have a viewfinder or a lcd screen on the back so I was having to aim by guesstimation.  It was aimed slightly too low as you see by the image below.  I was cutting off the head of my rower.

Well whether my rowing friend meant to or not she did me a favor by doing the following…..

In the middle of one of her efforts she clubbed my camera.  Did she do it on purpose?  I think this image proves that it was definitely an accident.

This left me with the following view….

I wasn’t thrilled with the fact that I was cropping the top of her head but it looked like a masterpiece compared to this view.  Well my mystery rower (I do intend to find her at the event tomorrow so I can thank her) was kind enough to take her paddle to my camera yet again.  Only this time she used it to straighten the camera back upright.

She placed it in a much better position than I had initially thus resulting in several images that will make the cut for consideration in the book.  So I wonder if I should give her partial photo credit?

I won’t be able to share any of those final images here just yet but I will leave you with this….

My buddy Juergen Beck from Freedom Light Productions is an excellent videographer who had already put a few days work into the dragon boat event.  He expressed silent criticism of the location I chose to mount the camera.  I guess I’ll have to admit that he was right.

Thank goodness that lady clubbed my camera.

That’s the first (and hopefully last) time I’ve ever said those words.