I realize that if I don't mention these now, I never will. Because by this time tomorrow--or the next day--all will be right with the world again. Mitt Romney will have an abundance of time on his hands, and, most importantly, as The Awl's annotators so ably note, White House photographer Pete Souza's long nightmare will be over.
Here are some rather amazing photos, almost two weeks old now, yet among the most recent to be posted to Mitt Romney's flickr stream, which is apparently the red-headed stepchild Log Cabin Republican to Instagram's Tea Party.
They're from a rally in, seriously, "Whites, Lancaster, OH, US," which simultaneously creates and conquers the mashup genre of photo-geotag-as-poetry-and-political-commentary.
Cox and Linkins are right to marvel at the WTFlighting because, holy smokes, the rally is being held at what cinematographers call "the hour before Magic Hour, where everything is drenched in either horrible raking light, shadows, or lens flares."
This is the stagecraft operation that seeks to inherit the mantle of Scott Sforza, the architect of the Mission Accomplished banner on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, which aircraft carrier he turned to catch the real Magic Hour."
With the setting sun lighting up a few buildings behind/around them, the Romney campaign fired up their rally stage, set in the middle of the intersection of Broad and Main in Lancaster, with two giant floodlights. Which also hit the crowd. No need to estimate how many people attended--you can count every one of them. They seem to fill around half the planned space, with the oldest of the old making sure the distant bleachers don't go to waste.
Here is my favorite glare, a photo I call "Idle-Class Tax Relief":
I assume it's a wide-angle lens or whatever, but it's fascinating to me how disorienting the perspective is on these photos. The size of peoples' heads. The indeterminate scale of that flag and those letters behind. And all uniformly in/slightly out of focus. Just so wild. It'll be good to be done with it.
