Paparazzi

Memorial Day weekend is traditionally a pretty big sports weekend across the country. Obviously, there's baseball, but there's also the Indy 500, NHL and NBA playoffs, as well as various NCAA championship tournaments.

I was originally scheduled to spend this weekend up in Boston, covering Northwestern lacrosse's back-to-back national championship. Unfortunately, athletics ended up deciding middle of last week that they didn't want to pay for my travel expenses, so I stayed here in Chicago. That and they were able to just hire a couple local students for cheap. I would have thought that athletics would pay the extra couple hundred bucks to reward my loyalty, as well as pay for the security knowing that I'm familiar with our playing style, and know exactly the kind of shots they were looking for. Oh well, hope they like their backlit, non-strobed, and partially cut-off team championship photo. The AP got a nice one though...

It's ok, because I ended up spending most of the weekend grilling and hanging out with friends instead, and then went to shoot the Cubs-Reds game on Monday. It turns out that Vince Vaughn was a celebrity guest today, and was scheduled to throw out the first pitch, as well as sing "Take Me Out To the Ballgame" during the seventh inning. Well, that explains the larger than normal crowd of photographers. Paparazzi. It was interesting watching them work though. They would basically all just follow Vaughn around and fire off photos of him doing whatever like crazy. When the game started, a few pulled out binoculars and started scanning the crowd for Vaughn and his rumored girlfriend, Jennifer Aniston.

Well, eventually the paparazzi found them together in a skybox, and started communicating with each other via headset walkie-talkies, and started photographing them in their seats with their giant telephoto lenses, which are actually longer than the ones us sports guys usually use. 500/600mm lenses + 2x teleconverters? Jesus. We only use 400mm lenses by themselves, sometimes 300mm. That explains how these uhhh, "entertainment photographers" can spy on celebrities out in LA get shots of them doing what they do, incriminating or not. Naturally, all us sports guys shot some frames of them too. I mean, if they're there, why the heck not? It was kind of amusing to do that, but if I had to do that all the time, everyday, I'd probably feel like such a scumbag. Celebrity hunt aside, I did my job and shot the game too. It was kind of slow as far as action goes, but it was good to see the Cubs pull out a 7-3 win!