Yeah Baby!

A professional photographer on assignment goes out to events and looks for photos that will capture the flavor and heart of an event to make the client happy. In a perfect world the photographer makes themselves happy too and brings home a picture or two worthy of a coveted portfolio spot. It's rare. Truth is in an average shoot the typical editorial shooter can hope to get one to three decent photos from an assignment. One great one wins the day. In my world it seems like I need to get dozens. From a music event for example I aim to get 40 reasonably good pictures for a web gallery display. I'm looking for the overalls, the tight shots, the unexpected, the artsy ones, the expressive or wild ones. You can't bat 1000 but you try. I really try. I tend to overshoot too because even when I get one I like I think maybe the next one will be just a wee bit better... on and on it goes.
So it was this weekend as shot the Yeah Baby event at Cal Expo and my oh my was it a hoot. Enormous turnout and the most wonderful baby faces, adorable kids, parents, tough looking tatted dads getting all sweet and goopy with their adorable daughters, it was delightful. The faces in the crowd alone were a marvel.
I saw this teenager playing pinball and wondered how he got dragged to this event since most of the children there were toddler age or younger. Lucky for him one of the vendors had a manly man kind of area with pinball, hockey, a pool table, big screen tv's and big overstuffed furniture to kick back on.
Overall it was pretty phenomenal and there was something worthwhile going on in every corner of the place...