Hot Dog!

This July 4th I took the long subway ride out to Coney Island to watch the annual Nathan's hot dog eating contest. Now, in order to get a decent spot, I had to get up about two hours earlier than I had in a long time. I picked up a bagel, some 50spf sunblock, and was on the subway at Union Square at 9:20. Even with the tremendous sun-blocking strength of the sunblock, I still needed to turn the extra white t-shirt in my bag into a turban, covering the back of my neck and half my face, the whole time wondering what people were thinking of me. Ugh, being a redhead can be annoying sometimes.

After watching the clock on the Wall of Fame count down for nearly 2 hours, the announcer eventually got up to the introductions, hamming it up in what I can only imagine was classic Coney Island fashion. As he got to the last two eaters, two cranes in front of the Wall rose with th American champion Joey Chestnut and the superstar of the eating circuit, Takeru Kobayashi, inside it. I was amazed to see Kobe flex. The man who had downed over 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes multiple times somehow has 8-pack of abs! And the guns!

The competition was exhilarating. These guys were downing hot dogs in about 15 seconds! I tried it myself.. it took me over a minute to eat one. As I'm sure you've read elsewhere, Kobe boke his own record and eat 53 and 3/4 hot dogs in 12 minutes. However, the kitchiest part of all this for me is that within seconds of the contest ending the Wall of Fame had already been updated to show the new record, and the timer was already counting down to next year's competition. 364 days, 23 hours, 54 minutes, 34 seconds.

Today's image is the second in a row that is a merge of two photographs. The main image of Kobe was taken during his initial introduction where he was flexing while in a crane high over the audience. The background and the foreground numbers are of the Wall of Fame, taken after the competition. It was a bit of effort in color correction (which I'm slowly getting better at), and then figuring out how to get the right balance of emphasis in the image. Had I known what the end result would be when I was shooting the event, this whole process would have been a lot easier.