Egypt., originally uploaded by sp.sullivan.
I covered an Egyptian solidarity march in Amherst yesterday for MassLive.com, where a couple hundred local folks marched through freezing rain as part of a national day of action.
I’ve covered a lot of demonstrations in my day. I used to joke back when I was working for The Massachusetts Daily Collegian at UMass that I was constantly on the protest beat: Pro-Israel rallies, pro-Palestinian counter-rallies; rallies for free speech, counter-rallies against hate speech; and so on.
This one was a little challenging because of the weather. Rosie had class (on Saturday!?), so I borrowed her Canon T1i to shoot video, bringing along my XSi to shoot stills (mostly because I couldn’t get the 35mm lens, my favorite, off my camera body for some strange reason.) Per usual, I recorded interviews with my Zoom H2.
Keeping water off the lenses was the biggest challenge, and droplets and condensation rendered a lot of my video and photos unusable. I was dressed for snow, and it rained the whole time. You’ll notice some of my crowd shots have a blurry glow — Rosie called it the “Barbara Walters effect” — which was caused by light bouncing around the condensation on the lens.
So to compensate I leaned pretty heavily on footage Al Jazeera made available through a Creative Commons license, letting one of the demonstrators narrate the protest with his reaction to the uprising in Egypt.
You can see the whole story, as well as a photo gallery, on MassLive.com.
Fun fact: I make an awkward background cameo in AmherstWire.com’s coverage of the event
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