You see, last year, I was there with my camera - it was an average DSLR. There were other people there with DSLRs, including the "official photographer", CrazyJow (of The Digital Lightbox in Hanover, PA), who didn't have a badge or anything of the sort and was using rather mediocre equipment. My friends' band was there, my girlfriend was selling her zombie arts and crafts, and I spent he day taking photos of everything. The official photographer spent the day eye-fucking me from the minute I pulled out my bag. I didn't really pay any attention to it, and it didn't seem like a big deal.
After the event was over, I and others posted my photos on the event page. Mine soon disappeared. I posted them again. They disappeared again. And finally, a third time I posted them... And they disappeared.
I gave up. Clearly this wasn't a Facebook error, and my girlfriend told me that the guy at the event was giving me dirty looks the entire day (I don't always notice as I'm an aspie).
I promptly forgot about the whole thing, because really... Who cares?
July rolls around and they start planning this year's walk. They ask my girlfriend to be a vendor, she says yes... Then it happens...
The "official photographer" asks her to tell me not to "be in his way" because I was "always in his way" and that is why he didn't get any good shots last year (the shots he got were all blurry and dark, not sure what that has to do with me).
To be professional, I figured I'd simply take photos of the band that I'm friends with (I'm pretty much their official photographer at this point - even did their album insert), and of my girlfriend's table and nothing else, simply so this guy couldn't cry about me being in the way. We both forgot about the whole thing and moved on...
The night before the event, this idiot e-mails me on Facebook and tells me to just "leave my camera home" because he is the official photographer, CrazyJow (of The Digital Lightbox in Hanover, PA), of the event - an event that's held in public and costs nothing to get into. Well, okay then... Now I was definitely bringing my stuff and taking photos of the band.
So I did that. I took photos of the band and absolutely nothing else. But he still insisted on running up to me at one point and asking me if I was with the band and telling me, "I'm the OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER OF THIS EVENT!" When I asked him if he told everybody else with a DSLR the same thing, he stammered for an answer and finally said, "Your equipment is good so I figured you must be official in some way to someone."
The entire time, I kinda made fun of the situation on Facebook and my friends poked fun at it. One of them decided to go make a joke on the official page of the event, saying they knew some "professional photographers who could take good shots if they wanted to hire any". And CrazyJow (of The Digital Lightbox in Hanover, PA) went insane after that.
He banned my girlfriend from vending next year (he's not even the head of the event - the head of the event is unresponsive to all of this and has ignored all attempts at communication - he must also be unrprofessional), threatened legal action over harassment (because of that post that was a joke), said he was going to sue me personally for "slander" because of what I had written on my personal FB page (just the facts of what was said and done), and then went as far as to refer to my bi-racial girlfriend as "a half-breed".
Here he is calling my girlfriend a "half breed", but it's okay guys, because he's one too!
Here he is telling me not to bring my camera:
Here he is admitting to me that he doesn't know how to use a speedlight/non-popup flash and basically telling me that he shoots on auto:
And don't point your flash with a diffuser on it at the sky... Or use a bounce card with it instead of the diffuser. He just doesn't understand that.
Finally, I'm gonna call out Charlie Ruckus of Ruckus Productions. He has been completely silent on this whole matter and not responded to anything. I've attempted to contact him, as has my girlfriend, about this entirely unprofessional situation. Instead of handling it, we've got nothing but silence.
...not to mention, the event was held on private property in a shopping center and they didn't even get permission from the property manager. How much more unprofessional can you get?
(And Joe's girlfriend is a racist, too, having posted on Facebook a comment about someone that read, "I know black people can't spell, but your white!" Yeah, YOUR WHITE. LOL! Now who can't spell?)
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