This was an annual independent presentation hosted by the Dundee Practical Shooters (Chehalem Valley Shooting Club) featuring 8 stages of 50+ rounds per stage.
It's a colorful IPSC match, highly demanding of both man and machine. Pistol malfunctions are part of the game here, and anyone who can get through the grueling demands of firearms reliability combined with heads-up situational awareness can honestly claim to have accomplished Something Special.
SWMBO didn't compete in that match, although I did. We plan to write and article describing the match to the Front Sight Magazine in the future, so I will write the commentary from the perspective of a participant and she roamed the range for the entire two-day duration taking hundreds of photographs.
The response from other competitors was much more than we had anticipated.
While she was taking photographs, SWMBO talked to a lot more people than I did. She was essentially the reporter in this endeavor. She met a lot of new friends, interviewed them, and took their pictures.
In fact, she took over 650 photographs, along with a significant number of movies (which cannot, of course, be included in the proposed Front Sight Article.)
Here's the problem:
We don't expect more than a half-dozen of the photos, at best, to be included in the magazine article. That's less than 1% of the photos she took.
But the people who competed are writing to say that they are interested in seeing the photos that she took.
In fact, I've received a number of emails asking me directly whether and where the photos have been posted to the internet.
unfortunately, I haven't yet established webhosting for this volume of photographs . . . they are all High Resolution, each photograph taking up over one megabyte of storage. Including the movies (video) and photos provided by other photographers, we have in excess of two gigabytes of photos available . . . all unedited, and none of them organized. (We have between 50 and 100 photos of people who were awarded trophies during the award ceremony; many of these photos are worthy of storage and distribution, but some are of such average quality, due to lighting conditions, that they are of interest only to the award winners and their friends and family.)
There are concerns about distributing these photos because we haven't acquired releases from the people whose images are depicted. The volume is too great to be manageable without editing, and this editing and image selection takes a lot of our personal time. And we are disinclined to take to time to indiscriminately 'burn' copies of the CD's for general distribution.
Because of these and other factors, and also because we have a proprietary desire to preserve the 'freshness' of the photos for inclusion in future magazine articles, we are disinclined to provide copies of the CDs for general distribution.
However, we acknowledge that some people would very much like to have access to at least a few photos which are of special interest to them. Why? Because they were having FUN at the match!
So here's what we plan to do:
With the permission of the Match Director of the Croc Match, we will purchase webhosting of sufficient server storage to make these photos available on the Internet. It is my hope that we can present them in a format which allows the casual viewer to scan the photos in a 'thumbnail' format, select the photos of special interest for full-screen viewing, and the download the photos for personal storage and use.
If it seems financially and legally feasible to do this, we will announce the availability of these photos on this website, probably sometime in October. If you are interested, you will have a limited time in which you can download the photos before we are forced to remove them to make room for other match photos from other Columbia Cascade Matches. (These might include the Albany Single Stack Match and the Columbia Cascade Sectional, both match having occurred previous to the Croc Match.)
No guarantees are possible now, and this entire 'photo gallery' scheme is dependent on the availability of webhosting at a reasonable price. Please understand that this webhosting is expected to be at my own out-of-pocket expense, and subject to constraints beyond my immediate control. I have been negotiating with section-related webhosting resources (ARPC and CCS both) for inexpensive, plentiful hosting of a photo gallery, and it may happen that the potholes in the road to providing a photo gallery is much smoother than I anticipate.
If I can provide general access to these photos, I will do so. If it turns out to be impractical, it won't happen. I'll regret it, because SWMBO has done a wonderful job of covering the matches photographically.
I'll keep you informed.
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