Commercial Photographer Curtis Comeau: Election Night Coverage 2010.

(Mandel supporters hearing the results)

Here is a series of photographs from Stephen Mandel's Election Night (last night) event in which he secured his third term in a major victory.

My involvement with Mandel's campaign was that I shot his portrait that was used as his 2010 campaign image.

(Taking a pause before addressing the crowd and media)

Because I'm more of a commercial shooter and not a daily newspaper photojournalist I am used to having the luxury of time and my subjects undivided attention. Whereas when shooting news a photographer has to battle in scrums to get his or her photo, not to mention your subject's attention is divided amongst several people all of whom are bombarded the subject with questions...

(I love this image because I am shooting it with a 200mm through the crowd)

I am well aware of what happens in scrums and the insanity of events like this, so for this series I decided to shoot the event in a little different style than everyone else.

(without question one of my favortie images of the evening, Stephen and his wife)
First off I shot in Black and White just like the campaign portraits. Then rather than fight the scrum and the crowds I decided to shoot them. I wanted my pictures to show tell the story of what happened as opposed to a tight ISO crop of Stephen.

While most of the main stream media was all scrumming the microphone shooting insanely tight I decided to pull back and shoot what the people were seeing... and then I noticed something really cool.

The crowd was really into what Mandel was saying in his speech, so I turned my camera on them. I think I was the only shooter in the room who had his back to Mandel while he was speaking.

I guess it may have been rude, but I just felt that the people in the room were just as much as part of the event and they provided excellent photographs to add to the story.