[Leica] al gore and photography

[don.dory at gmail.com (Don Dory)]

Kyle,
Thank you very much for getting my point.  Gore inevitably looks like a
raving lunatic all politcs aside; the rest of the group went off on a "Forum
Bent"

Make sure you wipe your lens off from the PLUG meeting, not everything needs
to be soft.

Don
don.dory@gmail.com


On 5/7/06, Kyle Cassidy <kcassidy@asc.upenn.edu> wrote:
>
> all this talk about al gore reminded me that the first time i met sal
> dimarco was at an al gore rally in 2000. it was the day he'd announced joe
> lieberman as his running mate. i was there because i'd happened to be
> standing in a room with a congressperson about three hours before when an
> aide came in with a bunch of tickets. in any event, i had 200mm f 2.8 and
> my domke vest. i squeezed into about the 76th row of what was literally an
> airplane hanger at a point where a person would almost fill up the view
> finder in a horizontal composition. not the best place on earth to be
> standing, but there wasn't a whole lot i could do about it.
>
> i was in place about 12 minutes when someone grabbed me by the vest and
> barked "hey! you know the rules! no press up here!" i tried to explain that
> i wasn't press, but the guy tugged me out of the crowd, handed me over to a
> very small woman in a blue suit and said "get this one back to the press
> riser." so she lead me back to a riser, about sixty feet further back,
> filled with offical looking news guys with 600mm lenses on expensive
> tripods. they all looked at my 200 like i was some sort of crazed imposter,
> except for this one guy at the very edge who yelled "kyle! kyle cassidy!" 
> --
> it was sal dimarco. i'd never met him, but he recognized me from the lug. 
> he
> shared his taped off spot on the riser with me (it said TIME MAGAZINE, 
> which
> i thought was very cool). i took some photos of a miniature joe biden 
> giving
> what was really a great lecture about economics off the top of his head
> while we waited hours for gore. sal had a cannon 300 2.8 mounted on a
> leica R8.  finally gore showes up, and sal snaggs the woman in the blue 
> suit
> and points to me and says "he needs to go up front". so she lead me to this
> roped off area in front of the stage, i photographed the whole thing with a
> 28mm lens from three feet away.
>
> al gore's wife, before she decided to devote her life to ridding the world
> of the evil that was Twisted Sister, was a photojournalist. i have one of
> her books, it's not bad. and al was, for a time, a member of the fourth
> estate himself.
>
> i didn't get a single good photo of him that day though. in every shot i
> have he looks like a raving madman with terrible teeth.
>
> bill clinton, on the other hand, you can't take a bad photo of that guy.
> he never blinks.
>
> that's my story, and i'm sticking to it.
>
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