💧 Three Stellar Race Photos

[Ah well. The price was right.]
After running a 5K last week, I was pleased to receive an email letting me know I had complimentary race photos available. It read as follows:

You crushed it at the Shoreline 5K! Your complimentary photos from MarathonFoto are ready to download and share.

It was 85° and sunny at race time, and while I was happy to land in the top 100 out of 1500+ finishers, I most certainly did not “crush it”. I was more than two minutes slower than my personal best, and in such a short race, that’s a lot. Nevertheless, I’ll happily snag a few photos from the race. Free is a much better deal than usual.

When I clicked the email link to grab my pictures, I was taken to a gallery of 11 images. Did MarathonFoto provide a way to download all my photos at once? Don’t be ridiculous. Technology hasn’t advanced to the level where that sort of convenience would be possible. Maybe someday.

For now, I was able to click the “Free Download” button on each photo, which turned into “Download Now” on hover. Rather than actually downloading the image, that took me to a second page featuring just the photo in question. There, I could click a “Download” button which finally did download the photo. After that, I could click “Back to Gallery” to repeat the tedious process ten more times.

Anyhow, let’s have a look at what the course photographers captured. Here’s a pretty nice shot of, apparently, stranger-to-the-site Ramgopal V. :

It is not so hot of a photo of me, though. I’m the out of focus guy in the blue hat, someone you’d retouch right out of there if you were Ramgopal:

There we go. Now it’s a great shot of this man who is unknown to me. I hope he finds it and enjoys it.

What else have we got? Well, here I am, once again on the left and out of focus:

Folks, level with me. Am I just naturally blurry, like Bigfoot?

The lousy photos above do demonstrate something notable. While race photos formerly keyed solely off OCR with a runner’s bib number, that’s changed. I recall being confused the first time one of these systems presented me with a photo where my face was visible, but my bib was not. I quickly surmised, however, that they were employing facial recognition. The future can be a real creep show.

Facial recognition wasn’t needed for our final photo though, nor even any use. Please enjoy this winner:

I think I’ll print that out and get it framed.