Hard work

Yesterday was the Centennial Celebration for the Main Library downtown here in Columbus. It was a free, community event partially sponsored by the Friends of the Library. Since we needed some stuff to talk about on the website, I volunteered to spend the day taking photos. (I had volunteered to do that well before I had stepped down from being a Trustee, so I felt it was important to follow through on that commitment.)

It was an interesting day. I learned a lot about covering an event like this as a photographer. One thing I learned is that any time you have an event with multiple activities going on in various parts of the building, it’s going to require more physical labor than you would think. Just lugging the camera gear around the building and up and down stairs all day is exhausting! Secondly, I learned that when you’re covering an event like this, you never really get to enjoy it. You’re on the move to get the next photo, there’s no time to sit and take in more than a few minutes of any one presentation. That was a shame, it looked like there was a ton of interesting stuff.

Lastly, I learned to stay flexible. I wound up spending a good part of the day with a reporter from the local paper who was collecting oral histories from folks who have been involved with the Library. Turns out he needed someone to take photos of people who came in to record their stories. So while that meant I had to miss out on some parts of the day, it also meant an opportunity to take photos that will be part of this experiment on both the Library’s and the papers websites later this week.

Besides, the Library had a couple of folks taking photos, and there were just some volunteers and attendees taking photos all day long too, so whatever I might have missed, I’m sure got covered somewhere else!

Overall it was tiring, but a great chance to get some practice taking photos in an environment I don’t get much practice in normally.

If you’re interested, I’ve dropped some of my photos into the Friends of the Library’s Flickr account.

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