Commentary: Saluting A Veteran Photographer
In advance of today’s Veterans Day holiday, former United States Navy man Pete Boden did what he usually does. He worked his butt off for a week solid in Key West, Fla., capturing images mostly for Speedonthewater.com. His duty started light eight days ago with the Sunday parade of raceboats on Duval Street for the Race World Offshore Key West Championships and steadily ramped up from there. His Key West photo duties included a practice session shoot on Tuesday, multi-race shoots on Wednesday and Friday, a rainy Saturday morning go-fast pleasure boat shoot from a helicopter that saw him battle the elements and another multi-race shoot on Sunday.
No one on the speedonthewater.com team works harder on event coverage than U.S. Navy veteran Pete Boden (click image to enlarge). Photo by Matt Trulio/copyright speedonthewater.com.
After each one of those race-day photo sessions, Boden had to sort through hundreds of images and transfer 20 to 40 of them to speedonthewater.com’s Jason Johnson and me for our daily race coverage. Having done this more than a few times, Boden, Johnson and I are pretty much in sync. By the time Boden sends his photos and Johnson sizes them for uploading to our online content management system, I usually have the story written. Then after Johnson copyedits—because copyediting your own work is a lose-lose—we publish.
This week, we watched the contests from three separate venues (see tomorrow’s story on speedonthewater.com) on each race day and I got the same question from all of our gracious hosts.
Do you ever stop working?
My answer was the same as Boden’s would be.
Not when there’s work to do.
Daily reporting takes commitment, and no one on our team has shown more of it than Speedonthewater.com chief photographer Pete Boden. Don’t get me wrong, the guy likes to play hard, too. But only after the work is done.
So thank you for your service, Mr. Boden, for what you gave to your country while you were in the Navy and what you do for us—and our readers—every day.
Related story: 2019 Key West Worlds and Poker Run Coverage
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