Run Jozi
Wednesday night, on Humans Rights Day, the Run Jozi Marathan was held. An initiative to take back the streets of Johannesburg, the race started at 7:00 on Nelson Mandela Bridge. The route went through the various parts of Joburg and was a total length of 10 km.
I went along as the support group for my brother and his team.
Knowing that it was going to busy, we met up at Michael's apartment at Main Street Life. It gave a good position to set the camera as I was then at the 3km mark.
My idea of photographing the team as they came past was soon lost as 10 000 runners came past in about half an hour. All wearing the same yellow t-shirts it was quite hard to find anyone that you knew. But not too worried about it, I snapped away. The first few runners came past with 15 minutes of the race starting. Flying by I didn’t even get a chance to shoot the guy in the lead. He was there and gone so quickly.
It was amazing seeing so many people out to support this cause. It was a long snake of people all the way down Market Street. I was hoping to get some images from the roof of MOAD but it was not open to us.
The other interesting part of the evening was the fact that I borrowed my cousin’s camera. I used to have a Nikon and suddenly I was using a Canon. So not only was I photographing with out a tripod in low light, I was also trying to remember which way to turn the shutter speed dial. I also had my father with me who kept asking – “what settings are you using?” – My reply – “I have no idea” My father – “ what ISO are you using?” – Me- “ As high as it will go!” So for those students just starting out, dont worry sometime we still get it wrong - wrong white balance,
So while the photographs are not great, I was there to get a documentation for my brother. I did get a few “creative” photographs. This translates into – No tripod, wrong shutter speed. But they ended up being interesting.
I also discovered that a 2GB memory card is not as big as I remember it to be. It filled up rather quickly. So the end of race fireworks ended up on my fathers compact camera – which means I have another challenge ahead of me to get those images from him.
