Recreate 68 Anti-War Protest

On August 24, the Sunday before the Democratic National Convention, I went down to Denver to photograph the first day of the week of protests organized by Recreate 68. Back when I had first heard that the Convention was going to be held in Denver I told myself that I would have to go down to photograph the protests, I knew there would be some and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to witness a big-time, newsworthy event first-hand.

Anti-war was the theme for the day and speakers included Ron Kovic, Ward Churchill and Cindy Sheehan. One of the more exciting moments was when Griff Jenkins of Fox News arrived on the scene and was surrounded by a crowd of protesters voicing their feelings about Fox News who were then surrounded by an even larger crowd of journalists trying to record the event.

I was fortunate to have been loaned a Leica M8 and a couple of lenses for the occasion. Photographing an event like this with a manual-focus rangefinder and two fixed focal length lenses was very, very different than using my auto-focus SLR with zoom lenses, it required me to change the way I thought about shooting. The lenses are so amazingly sharp and the image quality is fantastic but having to manually focus and using a view-finder that did not necessarily accurately reflect the photo being taken took some getting used to.