Friends in low places!

Photo by Bill Feig

I am in Baton Rouge right now having shot the UK-LSU game this afternoon. An old friend of mine, Kevin Martin, is now a photo editor at the Baton Rouge Advocate. Kevin has only been here for about 5 months and lucky for me he was around this weekend.

I flew into Baton Rouge Friday afternoon and Kevin picked me up at the airport saving the company a few bucks on a rental car. More importantly to me though was I was a first time visitor to the city and had NO idea where anything was. Kevin took me to my hotel near the campus and we met out later for dinner at a local Cajun place that was pretty good. A note to the Lexington readers of this post is that the local Cajun places we have in town were just as good!

The real benefit of having a friend in another town became apparent once the game started.  I am a Canon shooter and I just had a few lenses cleaned at the Super Bowl by Canon techs. I had not shot with my 80-200 since that game and once I put it on the camera today I knew I was in trouble. The lens would not auto-focus and would only fire intermittently.  I switched the camera to manual focus but the bigger problem was the camera would not fire when the shutter was pressed. I sent a quick text to Kevin who was sitting at the opposite end of the floor shooting. I told him I needed to trade him lenses and asked if he was willing to let me use his lens. My only other lens choice was a 300 2.8 and it was a little tight even at the other end of the floor so I would have been in real trouble at my end of the floor.  Without hesitation, Kevin jumped up and headed to my end of the floor during a time out and traded me lenses. He truly saved the day and the majority of the photos in Sunday’s Herald-Leader were shot with his lens! I bought him dinner to say thanks and I’m sure it was no big deal for him to help me out but it was a big deal to me. I owe him one, and the Herald-Leader owes him one.

481 views