Back in the day I used to spend my Saturday mornings at swim meets watching Ashleigh, Maurie and Maddie and the rest of the team and talking blurry action shots. 1 I even had a pool-themed layout for this weblog.
Although I clearly wasn’t destined to be a sports photographer, I loved going to those meets. They were more exciting to watch than the other sports I also tried to photograph (track, cross country, lacrosse, football) I got to hang around right next to the pool with the team and vaguely feel like I was part of a school-related activity.
All of this is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed watching Olympic swimming this week, the highlight being definitely Michael Phelps 8 gold medal quest. (Did you know he’s from Maryland? In an painfully sentimental way this makes me proud of my home state.) And I’d like to think that I appreciated it more because of all those Saturdays crouched on the floor at MAC and MLK in high school.
1 At one of my first swim meets an angry parent yelled at me for interfering with light that goes off to mark the start of a race. The camera I was using at the time didn’t even have a flash, but I still felt horrible, and once I got a new camera with a built-in flash it took me months before I felt comfortable using it.
tags: home, photography, swimming