Boston Marathon Monday

In Massachusetts there's a holiday found no where else: Patriot's Day. There's usually a baseball game in Fenway Park, and always the famous marathon.

I almost didn't walk the 200 meters down to Beacon Street to watch the first woman and men run by as I've done in the past. But then I thought: "I need to get a blip that doesn't involve me scrambling at the last second." With the women, there was an American leading the cluster of 4 racing to the line. The images are good, there's lots of pain on their faces.

I also captured a great sequence of the lead man. But then I decided to try and work on some panning with a runner and capture this pretty cool shot. This is one of those days where I had to work to find the one photo to blip.

I took this with a zoom at 1/50th of a second. I'm learning the key to showing motion blur (not that is is a very good one because the subject is a bit out of focus) has everything to do with the pace that you pan the lens. Since he was so close to me while running by, I probably could have shot this up to 1/120th or more and gotten a sharper subject while still burring out the background. I'll experiment more.