Since I’m in-between jobs and grad school right now, I don’t get to shoot as much as usual. In some ways that’s nice. But today I felt like I needed to take my cameras for a walk and when I found out that a “glow run” was happening I thought it would be a great chance to make some nice frames.
In my head I thought, “Glow run: Sounds colorful! Cliche! Visually appealing! Maybe fun!” And so on.
In reality, the glow run was pretty lame. Especially when I found out people paid like $35 to basically just run up and down a bike path along John Nolan Drive in a neon shirt.
It made me think that more event planners should consult photographers to make their events look cooler. For starters, if you’re going to call it a glow run, how about handing out excessive amounts of glow sticks or anything that glows in the dark? Not even half of the participants had anything glowing on them. Ugh.
The more events like this that I cover (especially 5k’s, 10k’s and marathons) it seems like the only reason people sign up for the event is take selfies of themselves at the race, photos with their friends at the race, a before and after photo of the race, a photo of their medal and then they go home. It’s kind of like people are in a competition to collect proof of their memories and then share them with others. Not that I’m totally innocent of this, but it’s something I’m becoming aware of when I’m out with other people. When the parody song Selfie played before the race I thought I was in some sort of ironic indie film about the depravity of humanity and technology. It was deep.
Honestly the most interesting part of the glow run was the light spillover from the DJ’s stage onto the porta potties and trees. Ya, that sounds weird, but I honestly stood over by the porta potties for ten minutes trying get a photo of someone walking out of the stall right at the moment of a flash of light. It never happened unfortunately but I still like the photo. I know, I’m pretty weird.
Lukas Keapproth 