Last Friday I went back up to LA but this time to the Federal Reserve Bank to photograph the Orange County Capital Markets Contest. As before I was overly impressed by the kids in the contest and their incredible grasp of the current economy and of overall finance, but I must digress.
Let me start off my story with the fact that I had to leave San Diego around 6:00am to beat the traffic. Something that if you have never been stuck in, I can only equate to as purgatory, or limbo. A place neither in heaven nor the "other" place, and yet not in this world. Nay, this is a far more frustrating world of speeders, slow-pokes, tail-gaters and (my personal favorite) the five foot-two on the cell phone for no reason surgically enhanced soccer mom in a Hummer H3 driver. Fortunately there were minimal amounts of any of those and I was only forced to think about brandishing any of my fingers.
After finally arriving at the Federal Reserve and parking, I made my way to the inconspicuous front door of the bank where I was greeted by an armed officer, metal detector and x-ray machine. After passing safely through the machine I was made to wait until I could be escorted by another officer. For understandable security reasons the Fed doesn't want anyone taking photos of the buildings exterior, interior or any of it's employees. Finally I met with my contacts, got all of my equipment ready and was off and shooting.
Although this room was considerably smaller than the one at Univision, it did allow me to bounce my flash much easier and also I didn't have any glaring window backlighting. The one technical problem that I did encounter was a mixture of fluorescent light, halogen light and incandescent lighting.
As I said earlier, these high school students were amazingly well versed in all aspects of finance and economics. The essays and visual presentations were all of top caliber and would have been impressive in any board room meeting.
During the lunch break I was able to speak at length with some of the team members who asked as many questions as I did. Mine were about the economy and maybe where I should invest some money and theirs were along the lines of "Are those cameras heavy?" and "How far can you see with that lens?", as well as "How many megapixels are your cameras?" We had very spirited conversation and quite a few laughs.
In the end, the team from the Pilgrim's school ended up with top honors- a cash prize plus a trip to the New York city stock exchange floor.
TO VIEW THE PHOTOS FROM THIS EVENT GO TO WWW.RMRPHOTO.COM AND CLICK ON YOUR EVENT.
