Mitch Thompson of Western Illinois

_MG_1710, originally uploaded by blazinhispazian.

Wow. Shooting track for an entire Conference is a lot harder than I expected.

We headed out Friday morning which worked out because I didn't have any classes and managed to go to my hard Thursday ones. There was a lot of confusion but it got cleared up eventually. The bus ride was about 2 hours. We headed straight to the track where the multi's were already competing.

I was relaxed the first minutes but later realized how busy I'd be. There'd be several events happening at the same time and I'd walk around with my flashes and get whatever I could. Shooting 1 school was hard but yeesh, must have been about 7 I think. Just non stop shooting for day 1. Didn't manage to work in a lunch break until night. Lasted about 2 minutes but it was good. Just a sloppy Joe.

Turns out the place didn't have wifi so I had to email the pics when we got to the hotel. (Holiday Inn) It took FOREVER!!! Horribly slow internet there. I talked to this other photographer, Richard, who was there shooting for Southern Utah University and a newspaper out there.

I ended up missing the team dinner in the hotel while I tried to get the pics out. Sounded good. I just went over to Culvers down the street and had to buy my own.

I stayed up for a few more hours editing a few and transferring the 6 GB's of pics to the portable hard drive and because of a room shortage from rain damage, our room of 3 guys only had 1 bed so I spent the few hours of sleep on the floor with a blanket and pillow. Wasn't too fun but I managed to fall asleep. The van for a few people headed out at 7:45. I missed breakfast but grabbed some granola bars at the track.

Day 2 was rough. Just so much going on- shot put, triple jump, 60m prelims, all going on at the same time. I mostly used my flash for the field events. Oh yeah, add Pole Vault to that list of simultaneous events. Shots turnout out well. The non flash shots were all at ISO 1600 so they were pretty grainy. Not really anything great. A ton of them were out of focus too so that was really annoying.

In total, I ended up with around 2500 pictures. Today, I edited it down to around 1000 so I just need to get those sent out to the Summit League on CD-R's and I'm done with all this.

Besides that, got papers to type, resumes and cover letters too. Got to add that 1st place feature story award to that. I should go.