Wednesday, April 29, 2009; Out in the free world
I shot my first gig last weekend, filled out all my official paperwork for unemployment and now Paulette and I are off to Costa Rica. I guess this is one of the upsides of getting laid off, when we planned this trip a few months ago I could not go because I had to work. By coincidence my good friend Warren Skalski was heading out to Mexico for a getaway on the same day but they had to cancel their trip the night before because of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico.
As we waited for our connecting flight in Miami I started to notice the masks. Anthony Carroll of West Palm Beach, Florida was the first person I saw. He was traveling with his family to Costa Rica and was peaking around the corner checking his flight when he caught my eye.
For journalists airports are a tough place to cover these days. With increased security only ticked passengers are allowed beyond security checkpoints in most cities so I decided to work the situation a little. The swine flu is huge news worldwide and if I could make a few nice frames I could try to send something back to one of the editors I know at AP in Chicago.
I made a few photos of Anthony and his family waiting to board our flight, a few more of other people using scarves to cover their faces and one of a flight attendant wearing a mask but I liked the moment of the family the best.
Since I no longer have my Blackberry and have not transferred the data over to a new device yet I now needed to track down my AP contacts in Chicago. Warren did some legwork for me to get the general e-mail address and I left a voice mail for Keith Swinden, my sports picture editor brother from the Tribune who is also out on the street with me.
Our flight was delayed and as we waited for the airline to remove a few bags from the plane belonging to passengers that did not show up for the flight so I walked over to Anthony and I got his information for a caption. I made a quick in camera edit, knocked out a quick caption I could use later and settled in for the flight.
At San Jose International Airport most of the workers and a handful of passengers wore masks. I knocked off a few frames of people walking through the airport and workers in the Immigration line, something I would never try in the US these days since I would certainly be detained and most likely arrested. As we picked up our bags the one with all my clothes was left behind in Miami. We made our way out of the airport and time clock was ticking for getting a photo sent out.
In the news business if you cannot turn your photos around right away they are not usable. First thing I had to do was download the card, edit and caption a few photos. Unfortunately, I could not get my card reader to work; everyday is a lesson in problem solving.
We tracked down an Office Depot and I picked up a new reader for about 6,000 colones (about 12 bucks.) The card popped up on my computer but the files would not copy, more errors. Next the card was showing no photos. I had to run Photo Rescue software on the card but was still not having a lot of luck. I managed to pull off about a half dozen photos but another 122 would not copy, 6 will do.
Finally, I was able to get online and the contact info from Keith was there. It was late in the day, we had not slept all night getting ready for the trip and by this time I am sure the wires were overloaded with images of people in masks from all over so I decided to chalk this one up as a learning experience for the freelance news business.
The next day Paulette had a bit of a cough so we went to a pharmacy to get her some cough medicine. They were pretty busy selling masks and their first worry is if you have the swine flu. How many days have you been sick and do you have a fever were the two questions they wanted to know. After giving Paulette some cough medicine the pharmacist asked, “How many masks do you want?” We figured we would join the hip crowd so we grabbed 5 masks, more on that later.
Here are 3 from the start of our trip.
Note to self; get your contacts in orders, get a wireless card and carry a spare card reader.
john
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