When pseudo-president Bush came to Lexington on Thursday to help raise an obscene amount of money for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, over a thousand Kentuckians turned out to express their displeasure with the state of the nation. Not surprisingly, a few of those protestors were Simpsons. I took the Nikon along and managed to snap a few pictures.
I tried to get some shots that would give a good portrayal of the overall crowd, but due to the number of people and the way we were spread out over several blocks, none of the crowd shots turned out to be as impressive as the real event. But I did manage to get a couple of good pictures of some Simpsons.
My neighbor was working crowd control, but by the time I got close enough to her and her partners for a picture, the light had faded to the point that all I got was a good advertisement for reflective tack. I realized later I probably could have gotten a better picture if I’d played with the camera’s ISO and exposure settings. It was shooting at ISO 200, and it’s capable of 400 or 800 (although 800 loses a little clarity). But I still haven’t used the camera enough to quickly think about how to best use its features. In fact, I was being totally bumfuzzled by how long it was taking to store each shot on the CF card, much longer than usual. The next day, I discovered that I’d somehow changed the resolution so that each shot was a 12 meg uncompressed TIFF instead of the 1-meg JPG that it creates in normal high-res mode.
I decided against taking a picture of the gorgeous woman who made my heart flutter. As she was standing there looking stunningly beautiful and unapproachable, attentively scanning the crowd in her dark pinstripe suit and dark glasses, with the little corkscrew wire sticking out of her ear, I contemplated my “Impeach Cheney First” sign and arrived at the painful conclusion that some things just aren’t meant to be. And, although it’s been over 25 years since my previous encounters with Secret Service agents (geez, that makes me feel old), the agency’s institutional memory is probably good enough that attracting additional attention would only be counter-productive. While I may have achieved some impressive stalking skills in my career, I think stalking a Secret Service agent is probably still a level above my accomplishments.