Hug-a-Thon

I have an old Canon EOS Digital Rebel camera that Dave gave me back in 2009. I used it pretty heavily for several years, but it's been sitting in a bag in our closet since I bought my much bigger Canon EOS 5D Mark III in 2012. I've been saving the smaller Canon as a backup, but I haven't touched it in all this time, and to be honest, if I needed a camera backup these days, I'd probably just use my phone.

I don't think the Rebel has much value, being 12 years old -- an eternity in digital equipment. So I decided to donate it to the school where I work. They use DSLR cameras in their photography classes and it has some lenses -- a zoom and a macro -- that could be passed around too. (They don't fit my current camera, which has its own bigger, better lenses.)

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I cleaned out the old camera's bag yesterday and I found a couple of memory cards, and on one of them were these pictures. I took them at a public attempt to break the world record for longest marathon hug, held at St. Pancras train station in January 2012.

I visited the event with a photography class I took that month -- in fact I briefly mentioned it on this blog, and when I re-read that post not too long ago (trying to find something else) I thought, "What ever happened to those pictures?" I never did anything with them -- never posted them to Flickr or blogged them. Now we know why. I don't think I took them off the memory card!

It was funny to stumble across them yesterday.

As you can see, the marathon huggers were a mix of people: older, younger, women and men. I wonder where they are now? This was almost ten years ago!

The pictures are of variable quality. I really like the second shot from the top, for example, but it's blurry -- as are many of my pictures from the event. I obviously didn't have my shutter speed set fast enough. (Probably another reason I never bothered to process the images.)

Still, I got a few decent shots.

Four of the marathon hugging couples were ultimately successful in setting a record, by hugging for slightly more than 24 hours. (The older women above got disqualified, along with another couple that was already gone by the time I arrived with my camera.) Their record was broken a few years later by some guys from Norman, Okla., who hugged for more than 32 hours straight!

This is why St. Pancras was chosen as the venue -- it's the site of a huge sculpture of a hugging couple called "The Meeting Place." The marathon huggers undertook their project at the base of this statue.

Anyway, a fun little journey back in time and memory!