How the Mad King almost killed me
One time, in a hotel on the west coast, I decided to get up in the middle of the night and hit the beach to get a shot I’d been wanting to take all day. It was past midnight, but I just couldn’t get this image out of my head of the crumbling foundations you see above.
I had this thought that the openings in the masonry looked like the angry eyes of a decrepit king and I knew I had to try to capture it or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. So, without waking my wife up, I grabbed my tripod and headed down to the beach. I set up a timed exposure and fired it off, running through the frame quickly with a handheld flash so I wouldn’t be recorded. I ducked in the first alcove and fired off the flash to light up one eye. I jumped out and slid into the second one and — for some reason — stood up straight.
I cracked the top of my skull on the rusty metal and stone, nearly knocking myself out. I knew I had to get the shot, so I made sure I was behind the wall and fired the flash off. As I walked back to the camera, dazed, I felt the blood begin to drip down the front of my face and into my eyes. I pushed it up into my hairline, checked the exposure and packed up to make the trudge across the beach and up to my hotel.
For the full tale of how I managed to haul my bleeding carcass through the lobby of the hotel and bandage myself up without any medical supplies, and likely with a concussion, you can listen to the full story near the end of Episode 12 of Lex Friedman and Dave Wiskus’ podcast Unprofessional. The episode, appropriately, is entitled ‘Naked and Bleeding’.
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