krnaturalphoto's Blog 
2018 Seneca 7
Sometimes I feel like I’m the luckiest person in the world. I have gotten to do so many things that make me happy and make life worth living. Somehow I was fortunate enough o break out of my shell and meet this great group of people that call themselves runners. I have fallen in with this group of people and we enjoy life together running and non-running alike. We have developed this little Elmira running crew who I have spent a lot of time running with over the past few years.
In 2017 we all wanted to run Seneca 7 together but we were not able to get registered for our own team. Several of us did get to experience Seneca 7 that year but not all together. In 2018 we were fortunate enough to be able to all be on one team together.
So for those who don’t know what Seneca 7 is, it is a relay race that teams of 7 run around Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes region of NY. The race is a total of 77.7 miles long. So when you sign up for Seneca 7 you are committing to a daylong event where you will spend the majority of the day traveling with 6 other people in a van. That might sound crazy, and maybe it is. But when your best friends are runners it is like one of the best days you can have.
You run you, you watch, you cheer. You drive, you navigate, you eat, you do ….. other things all in close proximity of your friends. You have to be very accepting of others to participate in this kind of event. You will be spending a lot of time together and might get to know each other better than you thought you would if you didn’t already know each other well. Seven friends in a van spending the day doing what they love, it’s like a party to me.
You are around hundreds of other people who enjoy what you do and are about the same level of crazy as you. Except maybe those bike teams, they are something special.
I loved being able to do this event with 7 of my best friends. The hardest part for me was the fact that I am a photographer and I like to photograph EVERYTHING. The weather was terrible. It was rainy and snowy. When you are packed in a van like sardines there isn’t room to bring the heavy duty camera equipment that can withstand some rain and snow. I brought cameras but most of the equipment wasn’t durable enough to brave the elements with. I had been really excited about the opportunity to document this event with my friends. Now I had to figure out how to make that happen as best I could. When you are a photographer it is hard to accept anything but the best quality of photographs you can get. At least it is for me. Maybe that is a flaw I need to work on, but it drives me.
I did have my GoPro with me and I worked with that tool as best I could to capture as many moments from our race as I could. I am not as experienced with the GoPro as I am with my other equipment and the super wide angle lens of a GoPro is less than ideal for photographing an event where you can’t necessarily be close to your subject. But the GoPro could withstand the weather. So I had to make it work.
I took a mix of single shot photos, time lapse photos, and videos to try and capture as much as I could of the event. Since I first began incorporating a GoPro into my photography I have been shooting an increasing amount of video. Most of this video I have recorded while I have been running. When you shoot video when you are running there will inevitably be some shaking of the camera. I have a steady cam to use but with the poor weather I also could not use that. So I shot video with my GoPro while running. I didn’t think it would be too bad. One thing I did not consider is that when I normally shoot video when I am running I am running at a more casual pace for me. During this race I was basically running all out. So when you try to run all out and hold a camera steady everything’s basically works against holding the camera steady. So the video was much shakier than I would have liked, but at least I recorded our adventure together.
I am happy to have such good friends. I am happy to be able to capture our fun times together even if it doesn’t come out as well as I would like. I can’t wait to record more of our fun times together.
