I spent the beginning of last week in Pennsylvania shooting a story for the PBS NewsHour about the Democratic Senate primary race between Arlen Specter and Joe Sestak. I went with producer Sarah Clune and correspondent Judy Woodruff, who were both really great to work with. Sarah was incredibly organized - the essential quality of a good producer.

Most of the days were spent following the candidate to their rallies. I have attended many rallies for presidential candidates, but I can't remember ever going to a rally for a congressional candidate. They were hilarious. Joe Sestak gave a speech in a suburb outside of Philadelphia from the bed of a pickup truck. Arlen Specter gave one in a union hall where there were more people on stage than in the audience. Sarah and I felt really bad for him after that one.

Unfortunately, some of my favorite footage didn't make it into the piece. We spent a couple hours at the famous Pat's cheese-steak restaurant. I got some great shots from inside the kitchen of them cooking the meat and making the sandwiches and we shot some vox pops with the customers, but the segment got cut. We also spent a lot of time trying to get nice shots of the skyline. I got some from the Phillies stadium and some from the top of a parking garage at Drexel University, but those didn't make it into the piece either.

Like most of these trips, the days were packed. When we were done shooting, I couldn't just go to sleep. I still had to offload all of the footage from my camera to external hard drive for Sarah to log and transcribe. Monday we left the hotel at 7:30am, shot all day, interviewed Joe Sestak at 9:00 that night and didn't get to bed until 2:00am Tuesday. I shot over six hours of material and WETA shot a couple more, but when it was done being edited, the piece was only ten minutes long.

Here's a link to the video.