Missing at Sea

  Last night Cathy and I were watching television while she was surfing the web. She piped up with a news story about some football players missing at sea a couple of which were former USF players. They went fishing Saturday in the Gulf of Mexico and never returned.

  At first I didn't think much of it until late this afternoon when the U.S. Coast Guard found one of the missing men. Then tonight while watching Charlie Gibson I saw an update on the story and it hit me how much of a national story this was turning in to.

  I ran to my office and began searching the web for information on the remaining USF player. I found out what year Will Bleakley played and his jersey number. Then I pulled the first USF game I could find for the 2006 season which just happened to be a game here in Orlando against UCF. 

  I scrolled through the 800 images I had from that game and didn't see anything pop at first. But then it jumped out at me and screamed. I had shot a few frames of some USF players waiting in the tunnel to enter the field before the game. There on the left side of my frame was Will. It was a great frame to have of him. He had nice soft light on his face and a dark background behind him.

  I checked the box score for that game and Bleakley only caught two passes the whole game. I had shot one of them. Actually I had an entire sequence of him being pulled down by half of the UCF defense.

  Then at the end of the game I fired one frame (and only one frame) of Bleakly celebrating the Bulls' 24-17 victory over the Knights. He was jovial and smiling. Perfect!

  I tagged about six images in all and emailed my agent to notify them that I was moving some file images for this story.

  After I typed the captions for the images I uploaded them to Icon and let them know when the transmission was complete. Sell baby sell!

  It looks like I'm the only one out there right now with any action images of Will which should hopefully garner me some sales to news outlets. More importantly all three remaining men missing in the Gulf have my prayers. 

  This is another reason why I stay away from bad contracts where I don't own the rights to my own images. I would've never guessed 2 1/2 years ago that those "throw-away" images would have any value but today they do.

  Say a prayer for Will, Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith.