Oh Obama

Friday was the kind of day that most college journalists can only hope to see.

Besides having the biggest college weekend in full swing, Sen. Barack Obama decided to make a surprise visit to the Women’s Little 500 race.

I was there to cover the race for the IDS photo desk, but I ended up taking some 300 photos of Obama. It was a pretty crazy and hectic scene at Bill Armstrong Stadium as Obama and his entourage – No, Jeremy Piven wasn’t there – made their way around the track before the race.

Track security at first tried to tell me I wasn’t allowed in the infield as showed them my infield press credential. I got in eventually and headed straight for the mob of photographers who were swarming Obama as he made his way around the track.

At one point, I ended up directly in front of Obama about 6 feet from the senator. I was using a 80-200 mm zoom lens so I had to keep backpedaling so I could keep him in focus at 80 mm. As I was in the process of backpedaling, Obama pointed and chuckled as I almost fell over a wooden chair that was behind me.

Obama took up a spot outside turn three to watch the opening laps of the race, and I was able to get a few good shots of him from the middle of the corner.

As soon as he left, I had a problem: I only had a couple hundred shots left on my memory cards for the race itself. Luckily I was able to make it through the race with what I had by being very conservative with my shots.

The real fun began after the race when all the IDSers met up in the IDS newsroom to start going through our stuff. I ended up staying at the IDS until around 11 p.m. captioning photos and sending Obama photos to the Associated Press. In the end, we put together a Obama slideshow for our Web site. The AP ended up picking up nine of our Obama shots from the day.

Overall, it was a crazy day, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.