Post Time, the two-page photo spread near the front of the magazine, strives to grab readers, make them stop and look, hopefully linger and get comfortable with reading the magazine.
Something like that anyway.
Last September, we were trying to finish the October edition and didn't have a Post Time choice. Not a logical one anyway. Barrie Reightler sent me an email about skipping the photo to make room for an advertisement and maintain whatever page count we were trying to hit. I replied that there are no cardinal sins in magazine production. Well, there are but skipping Post Time isn't one. I made a couple of suggestions -- something historic of Mountain Dew and Janon Fisher III (who'd died at age 90) or maybe something from the Charles Town Classic race.
Reightler ran with it from there, finding Scott Serio's remote on his Eclipse Sportswire photo website, making the choice and creating a Post Time for the ages. As Reightler called it then, the image of Skippylongstocking and jockey Jose Ortiz is "extraordinary" and won the Eclipse Award as Thoroughbred racing's top photograph of 2024.
The story behind it might be even better. Serio went to the emergency room to get that shot.
To set up a remote camera near the finish line early in the evening, he stepped through a gap in the inside rail and dislodged a protective foam pad which -- unbeknownst to Serio or anyone else -- housed a nest of bees. The bees swarmed, assistant Tim Sudduth yelled, Serio ran, tripped and fell to the track in a tangled mess of cameras, lenses, mini-tripods and other photo equipment plus bees. Stung five times, Serio landed on his shoulder, chest, ribs and a camera or two.
"I wrecked," is how he put it. "The cameras went tumbling, the bees stung me, I couldn't breathe, my ribs hurt, my shoulder hurt, everything was all over the place."
A few years ago, Serio had surgery to remove a portion of a lung due to a cancerous lesion. A bruised or broken rib could easily complicate matters.
"I fell hard and just said that I should get it checked out," he said. "They put me in a Gator, we met an ambulance for a ride to Jefferson Medical Center. They did X-rays and it didn't look like I'd broken anything, but they said I was going to be in some pain."
He got a shot in his left arm for the pain and caught an Uber back to the racetrack, where Sudduth and Sam Dixon were handling the photography details. In his truck in the parking lot, Serio pondered his next move. Two photographers could handle the job; three would make it easier.
How about two and a half?
"I didn't want to drive all the way down there and then have this happen and not even try," said Serio, who concentrated on the remotes while Sudduth and Dixon handled the main cameras. With one arm, on painkillers, Serio re-aimed the cameras and fired the PocketWizard trigger that got the winning image -- after moving the camera a few feet up the stretch to get away from the bees.
Plenty had to go right to produce the photo, but the track configuration and 11:09 p.m. start set the stage.
"I love Charles Town because that inside light is about half a stop brighter than the outside light and it creates this studio effect with lights inside and outside and it can get cinematic," said Serio, who can go full photo-geek in seconds. "The hot spot is not at the finish line, it's actually three to five feet past the finish line. If the horse runs in the right spot, you get a spotlight on him and that's where Skippy ran."
On the drive home, with Dixon at the wheel, Serio pulled up the remote and had a look.
"Ahh, this one's pretty good," he said.
Serio grew up "in the shadow of Memorial Stadium" in Baltimore, became a racing fan through his father Gus and can remember crawling around the clubhouse restaurant at Pimlico as a kid. Serio was a fan of Ruffian and went to Charles Town in 1982, so Gus (who died in 2019) could bet Conquistador Cielo in the Belmont Stakes. While in high school in 1986, Serio attended the first Maryland Million and took one-frame-at-a-time photos with a Pentax K1000. Two years later, his photo of Little Bold John made the Maryland Horse magazine.
In 1992, he got a photojournalism degree from the famed program at the University of Missouri, but couldn't find a job and became a Baltimore City police officer in 1993. Freelancing as a photographer all the while, he retired from the force in 2013 to focus on the Eclipse Sportswire photography business whose clients include major publications and the Breeders' Cup among others. In 2015, the Colora, Md., resident won an Eclipse for an image of American Pharoah. He said collecting a statue for work in this magazine brought new heft.
"I grew up reading the Maryland Horse," Serio said, pointing out Skip Ball, Cappy Jackson, Douglas Lees and other photographers as influences. "It is incredibly rewarding to earn this award for an image published in that original publication's current iteration."
If a little painful. Reightler had heard about the bee incident, some of it anyway, before she made the Post Time choice. I even tried to work it into the cutline, but eventually gave up because there wasn't enough space. "When he wins an Eclipse Award for it," I emailed Reightler, "we can write about it."
Mission accomplished.
