Rolling Thunder

For the last few years I have shot the riders leaving Patriot Harley Davidson here in Fairfax. It is a very large group numbering well over 1,000 riders at my best guess. It takes about 30 minutes for everyone to ride by and shooting this group is always lots of fun. This morning I met up with friends Greg Daily and Jack Nevitt to shoot along Nutley Street in Fairfax. This year Jack and I decided to head downtown and shoot the group in D.C. Let’s just say I won’t make that mistake again. The biggest issue was the crowd in D.C. lacked some basic courtesy to their fellow man. We set up on Constitution Avenue with 7 lanes of traffic. As soon as the riders started driving by, the crowd immediately moved 3 lanes out into the street. At first this seemed to work since the motorcycles were riding down the center of the road 2 wide. For the next hour the police went up and down trying to get the crowd back up on the curb, but within minutes everyone was back out into the street. Then some people would cross the street, causing the riders to have to stop their procession. Add to that people jumping in front of us while we were taking pictures. After a little over an hour we had enough of this madness and decided to head back home.


With so many riders traveling across the country to ride in this amazing event, I’m sad that the locals could not have shown more courtesy and respect to our visitors.

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