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Shots from the 2010 Gateway Classic, held April 24 in Lake City, Florida, are up on the site.

Promoter Tony Curtis turned out another good show, though as usual of late, there were too many bikini babes and not enough bodybuilders entered in the show.

Lighting was somewhat sketchy as well, but the short distance between the stage and the audience helped that a bit.

Posing routines in the prejudging are pretty much a thing of the past, so I’m refining the format of shooting groups where the presentation is in groups, and individuals where the presentation is in individuals. We’ll see how that goes but it seems to be working well for now– and certainly saves me a lot of time and effort.

Gotta love this one: Bill Clinton, the man who weaseled out of public pillory by convoluting “what the meaning of ‘is’, is”, is telling us that *now* it’s critically important what people say.

Bad news, Mr. Clinton– you can tell the whole truth and still be a hypocrite.

Riding my motorcycle home this afternoon I was almost run off the road by someone in a hurry, whose car was sporting one of those goofy “Coexist” bumper stickers.

The irony was excruciating. Luckily nothing else became that way.

Shots from the 2010 Jacksonville Physique are up on the site.

I decided to go to “The Pit” (aka the Lazarra Theater at UNF) mostly as an experiment– there are many good shows being held there and I needed to find *some* way to get some decent shots.

The first few shots should give you an idea of the typical “audience experience” at Lazarra— I had one of the best seats in the house, fourth row center, where the slope of the auditorium floor has begun to rise but not so far away as to _guarantee_ lens jiggle in every frame. And my view was terrible.

“Keyhole surgery”– in this case trying to find a decent shot on multiple moving targets while threading between judge’s heads, Ian’s arm, meandering gofers, and the UNF Marching Ospreys– is an experience I strongly recommend if your blood pressure is boringly normal and needs a good spiking. I’m sure my ocean-like swaying to find a line on the shots did not endear me to the people sitting behind me, either, as their view was equal to mine plus one row worse.

None of this, it should be mentioned, was the promoter’s fault– he had offered me a seat behind the judges, next to Ian. I declined simply because my last attempt from that location was, well, bad and humiliating; moreover, there was little point in essentially duplicating Ian’s shots. I was still looking for something I’d not noticed before– something out of the ordinary. Lazarra *does* have an upper tier, and if I had one of those high-powered, $2500 sports lenses, I’d crawl against the rail with a tripod and shoot the show with a smile. Alas, with what I had, I had to keep looking.

For Lazarra to _really_ be workable for bodybuilding competitions, the stage needs a riser of at *least* eight inches (and a foot would be better), some enhanced lighting, and either some decorative statuary to offset the backdrop (something like the St Augustine shows often had) or else a backdrop in some other color than “Neutron Star Black”.

But I’d just called the service, and they confirmed that (yet again) no one has died and left me Grand Exalted Poo-bah King of Stuff, so my mission remained the same– think outside the box and find *some* way to get some shots.

Then I noticed the box wings– a tier of seats to the far left and right of the auditorium, running up past the first row, elevated about two feet above stage level, at a somewhat sharp angle to the competitors but with an unobstructed field of view to the stage itself. And the entire block of seats was currently unoccupied. Maybe, I mused… just maybe… if I could find a short break in the competitor lineup (and Deke was wasting no time this morning!) I could, you know, check them out…

Feh! The seat I *had* wasn’t going to get any better, so I grabbed the long lens and hustled up the aisles and over to the seats. Jackpot!

You can see on the show collection exactly where the shots changed angles, and that meant I once again had static white balance, just enough light bounced from the floor to give me some nicely accurate skin tones, and the view was open enough that the auto-focus wasn’t doing St. Vitus’ dance like before. The one trade-off was that the sharp angle to the competitors was, well, fairly useless when they were posing to the front of the stage. I got around that by shooting mostly the groups– which meant less post-processing work for me on Easter, so one-and-a-bonus there.

Speaking of Easter, there was some pretty foul language coming out of the speakers during the prejudging– easily bad enough that Pete would have disqualified any competitor on the spot for using it. I don’t think anyone officially _sanctioned_ that particular slice of what I will for lack of a better word call “music”, but why have music during the prejudging anyway? Save the glitz for the night show, says I, and furthermore–

Whups, the service just called, and I am still not Grand Exalted Poo-bah King of Stuff. Disregard. Enjoy the shots, and ignore the rambling.

So the looney left, led by Garry Trudeau, is having a tizzy over the fact that Starbuck’s is allowing customers to openly carry legal weapons in their stores.

Trudeau imagines all sorts of terrible outcomes, but they are based on flawed assumptions, and cease being funny where they become obviously untrue. Trudeau, like most liberals, loves to paint gun owners as some sort of dangerous, unstable, uneducated mob. In reality, anyone willing to exercise their Constitutional rights is almost always aware of the serious responsibilities their choices entail.

Put it another way: Is Starbuck’s suffering because of the frenzied liberal fear-mongering? Heck no. Starbuck’s has to be your community’s safest place outside of the local police station.

Who’s gonna rob a Starbuck’s these days? Only the Democrat rabble-rousers who threw eggs at their own candidate’s bus, just to make the opposition look bad.

From this article on the health care bill from the AP:

In Iowa on Thursday to trumpet the benefits of the legislation, Obama said, “We made a promise. That promise has been kept.”

Yay, one in a row. The fact that he broke an estimated 3,254 *other* promises to keep *this* one goes unmentioned.

“Five days of public comment before signing bills”? Didn’t see it.

“Negotiate health care reform in public sessions televised on C-SPAN”? Must’ve been preempted.

“New era of bi-partisanship”? Hell, he had to buy votes from his *own* party.

“Most open and transparent administration in history”? Well, we can give him this one. He didn’t promise it would be *honest*, and it’s transparently *not*.

The great legal challenge to the health care bill is both procedural and Constitutional.

Pursuant to the 10th Amendment, Congress does not have the authority to just vote themselves new powers such as it is attempting to do.

What would be needed for such a thing to happen would be a national referendum with a majority of Americans voting to modify the Constitution to say that health care is a right (which it isn’t, not least because there is no equal and opposite responsibility that can be associated with it) and that we wish to cede to the Federal government the authority to administer it.

Moreover, also pursuant to the 10th Amendment, the Federal government lacks the authority to compel citizens to purchase a given product or service. They might be able to *do* so, at least temporarily, but they are violating the Constitution in the attempt.