At the Western Michigan University football game on August 31, 1995, I was in the Waldo Stadium field along with several professional photographers on assignment for our respective newspapers/organizations. In the drizzle, I was trying to keep my equipment dry using a plastic bag that once contained a loaf of bread. With a Nikon F3HP mounted on a MD4 motor drive and Nikkor AF 300mm f/4 lens, I was lucky to have captured in sharp focus one of the two streakers running across the field. The film used was Kodak Tri-X that was push processed from ISO 400 to ISO 1,600.
The Western Herald provided the film. I provided the camera equipment. I developed the film and printed the picture using the provided materials (i.e., developer, fixer, stopbath and photo paper), equipment (i.e., film developing tank, squeegee, photo chemical tubs and photo enlarger) and darkroom. My compensation was just $5 per picture published. It wasn’t for the money that my fellow college photojournalists and I were working for. It was because of our passion in photography that we did it.
Everything happened so fast that I’m amazed that the picture turned out OK even though it was manual focused. As a matter of fact, I could not remember if I had any pictures of the football game published. It is my understanding that I was the only photographer who got a usable picture of the streaker. If it happened today, my guess is that hundreds of spectators would have snapped away using their mobile phones and posted their pictures and videos on various social media sites!
