alittlenews

Yes, this is a basketball post but it is really a post about shooting outside the lines.  Ultimately it is a post about surviving in the brave new world of photojournalism.  When I shoot action I tend to be intensely focused on what is going on in front of me, meaning the game.  This was especially true early in my career.  Partly this was insecurity about my ability to shoot action and partly it was about my ignorance of how to do my job.  As I have aged, no wait, matured, not exactly right either.  How about as I have grown?  Sounds like I have gotten fat, which is also partly true.  Let’s see, how about adapted and gotten better.  There, that is it.  At least it sounds like I haven’t  have gotten old, fat and bald!

What was I talking about?  Oh yeah, shooting outside the lines was the topic.  Or was the topic photo galleries?  Oh yes, as I have gotten better over the years I have become more confident in my ability to capture the game action which has allowed me to look around some during the games.  There is another world of coaches, cheerleaders, spectators and stuff out there to shoot that helps complete your coverage.  Now there is a balance, one might even say a limit, to this.  You have an assignment to cover the game and all of this comprises the game atmosphere.  How much you focus outside the lines is determined by your assignment.

If you have an assignment to cover the game from the sports desk your focus will be the game and the bench areas.  If you have a more feature oriented assignment your focus will be more around the edges and up in the stands.  Any more, we have to do all of this all the time for the online galleries.  Not being one to complain about having photos published this whole idea of photo galleries is a double edged sword.  You can become enslaved to the gallery and actually not do as well covering the assignment.  The best idea is to find some balance.  If you are looking around in the stands for features and miss the key play to the game then you have completely failed to do your job.  If you get all the plays but miss the reactions and the fans and all the other stuff that makes up the game atmosphere you have also failed to do your job effectively.

My friend Rob Carr addressed this issue in a post he wrote for us a while ago.  He simply asked the question “is more better?”  I think we all know the answer to that.  More is definitely not better unless it is actually better.  If more is not better more is just, well, more.  Probably no one would waste their time on a gallery of images loaded with mediocrity.  At least they wouldn’t do it but once.  The balance is there is no reason to come to a site that doesn’t offer enough.  In the newspaper business we are all searching for the balance.  That means there will be pendulum swings from one extreme to another before we find the sweet spot.  At The Decatur Daily we are experimenting with really overshooting assignments so we can publish more faces.  Saturday I shot three assignments that in the pre-internet days would have warranted four or five photos from two and maybe three from another.  I turned in about fifteen shots per assignment.

The down side of all this is that we are turning in many more photos than the assignment calls for which means we are going to be turning in some photos that are not up to our standards.  Some of these photos don’t seem to forward the story at all.  They are just there in the hopes of generating page hits.  If you let it, stuff like this drags you down and can be very frustrating.  The upside of all of this is it presents an entirely new challenge.  How do I fill photo galleries with images that do have meaning and do forward the story and still meet the requirement of publishing more and more photos?  Like all things in the business these days, this dichotomy will drive some to new fields of endeavor and it will push others to excel.

I am certainly not a Darwinist but there is something to be said for adaptation.  If we don’t adapt to whatever the reading public demands then we utterly fail and the photojournalist will become extinct.  This seems an entirely preposterous idea in the face of ever expanding demand for visuals.  The problem is the changing environment is not a stable environment and instability breeds danger.  New media has created opportunities for anyone running around with a cell phone to fill the public’s visual hunger.  Professional photojournalism, for all its craft, technical and aesthetic excellence, and credibility can easily fall prey to the changing world where photo buyers no longer have to pay for images.  They are available for free everywhere.  I did not say high quality images are available for free everywhere.  I also did not say that images produced in a highly ethical environment are available everywhere.  I just said images are available everywhere.

The end game here is that we have an opportunity masquerading as a problem.  Focus on the problem and you are doomed.  Become angry or frustrated and you are doomed.  Adapt to the demands of the new environment and we might find that we have successfully weathered the storm of change and have learned how to survive in the new media world.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

I just spent the week covering the Northwest Regional high school basketball tournament in Hanceville at Wallace State.  This is as close to basketball heaven as you will get in the great state of Alabama.  Wallace State has, without a doubt, the best gymnasium I have ever shot in.  I don’t know if there is a better one anywhere in the state.  The light is fantastic and the arena is really excellent and they serve the best chocolate chip cookies in the hospitality suite.  What more could one ask?

The winners of the Regional advance to the State Final Four in Birmingham but the arena in Birmingham is nowhere near as nice as this one.  The lighting is much poorer and the facility is older and you are in Birmingham as opposed to a quiet little country town.  Which begs the question, who do these people know to get such a facility?  The entire campus at this community college rivals anything you might expect to find at a four year school and they keep on building new structures.  Amazing!  Their politicians must really be good.  Whatever, it is a great place to shoot hoops.

I shot 13 games over the past four days and I am fairly certain I now have a basketball bouncing around in my head.  Whenever you shoot that much hoop action, or that much of anything for that matter, the challenge is keeping it fresh and approaching each game with the proper attitude.  This requires a vastly different approach than shooting a half of one game and rushing it back to the paper on deadline.

Whenever I shoot a regular season game on deadline I have only one real goal; to shoot a few successful images and get out of there as quickly as possible so I can get the images in the paper on time.  But with the tournament, many of the games are going on during the day with no deadline pressure.  This means there is plenty of time to shoot and explore your options.  The lighting at Wallace also frees you from the shackles of slow recycling strobes so you can essentially shoot basketball like you would any other sport.

My strategy is very simple.  I check out the teams and see how athletic they are.  If I have teams that are very athletic I will take two approaches during the game.  I will shoot about one quarter with nothing but a wide angle zoom.  In my case it is a 17-35.  This allows me to get the athletes flying around in the area of the basket or diving for balls around the base line.  I usually shoot from a low angle and don’t even look through the viewfinder.  Just set it low and let it rip. If the teams are not very athletic then I use the 80-200 and hope for the best.

The second part of this involves shooting with a long lens but especially a 300mm.  I use this to get the mid-court to opposite end of the floor action.  This lens is great for getting those steals and blocked shots and it works well when shooting the coach or tight stuff of players on the bench.  These days we have to shoot a lot of features so I devote a small amount of the game to shooting a few features.  These are almost all for web galleries but one does pop up in the paper from time to time.

Finally, I use the 80-200 for close to mid-range action.  This is my work horse lens during the regular season because it is the lens I am most comfortable with.  It is pointless to drag a 300 into a gym you are having to light unless you have the time and equipment to light both ends of the floor.  That means the 80-200 is my friend.  I normally don’t shoot with a 17-35 on a regular season game because it is a lens that can produce amazing pictures if you have time to wait but it can also produce nothing at all.  This means I go dance with the girl that brought me and stick with the 80-200 when the pressure is on.

At Wallace State, you can get some nice photos from the stands too.  The arena slopes up dramatically so you can get quite high in the stands and shoot down on the court.  It is not nearly an overhead view but it certainly changes your perspective.  My normal shooting position is right under the basket.  I have adopted that position because the ref never stands directly under the basket.  I will also move around the edges of the court behind the benches and things like that to vary my points of view.  Shooting a tournament is just a great way to put everything you have into play.  You have the time to try things you can’t do during the regular season and you have the freedom to use a variety of lenses and perspectives.

If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section and I will answer them there.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

The wicked witch is dead!  That is my way of saying that basketball season is over.  Really, I am joking around.  Now that I work day shift basketball has become a pleasant diversion in my schedule rather than the cruel task master that required six games a week, almost every week from the end of November through the end of February.  That is a lot of games and I am glad that my basketball this year amounted to an occasional game here and there until tournament time.

Now tournaments are a different story.  There is real drama there and real emotion.  I love basketball’s post season.  One and done if you lose and that means that these kids, some of who have worked together as a cohesive unit since seventh grade, are really invested in the game.  Boys and girls are equally emotional and equally spirited in victory and defeat.  Tough guys cry when the loose and there is real, serious, jubilation when they win that last game.  I was not lucky enough to cover a final this year.  I had all semi-final games so the emotion for the two teams I covered that won was subdued.  They were saving it for their championship games.  The one team I covered in the final four this season that lost in the semi-finals had some real emotion.

That is really what covering a championship tournament is all about.  You certainly want nice action but the photos that lead the sections will almost always be emotion, win or lose so paying attention to the faces is more important than during the regular season.  Besides, if you have shot the entire season, you have already done every conceivable action photo.  The emotion is a great break from the unending series of jump shots and layups.

I hope you can endure one more slide show of basketball images.  I tried to focus on the Brewer High coach Ricky Allen’s wife as she reacted in the stands.  She was sitting just behind the bench and cutting up when the team was way ahead then agonizing when the game got really close.  Eventually, the Lady Patriots won a two point game to make it to the final game.  Allen has been coaching something like 30 years and about 25 of those have been at Brewer.  This was his first trip to the final four.  Brewer has had only one other team ever compete for a state title in any sport so this is a big deal for the school.  Our newspaper story said they had about 1,500 fans who made the trip.  That is why we cover schools so much.  The community rallies around its school and not just in sports.

The teams in this slide show are the Tanner High School Rattlers, a 2A school that has been to the this tournament three years in a row and lost to the same team, I believe, every year.  The Hazlewood Golden Bears who are also a perennial power.  They do have some state titles in girls hoops but none in the last few years.  They won the 1A State Championship Friday afternoon.  There is talk of closing their school and combining it with another so this was a big win for them.  Finally, the Brewer Lady Patriots are competing for a State Championship today in the 5A class.  So blessings upon all the schools there.  It is one of those times in life where you are standing at, or at least very near, the pinnacle.  Enjoy the view!

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Here is a slides how of my favorites from the Northwest Regional Tournament held at Wallace State College in Hanceville. This high school tournament is my favorite of the year and is actually as good as the state finals but with a better facility.  The lighting is incredible.  You can shoot available light at ISO 1000 and get 1/640 f2.8 on my Nikons or 1/800 at f2.8 on my Canon at the same ISO.  This is just amazing.  After you have done the one shot, wait for the strobes to recycle, dance all year, it is great to just be able to shoot with motor drives blazing.  It makes it tough to miss.

We will be covering the State Final Four next week in Birmingham at the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center.  It is a good arena too and more centrally located for the whole state but it doesn’t come close to the lighting quality at Wallace.  They usually don’t turn on all the arena lights at the BJCC so you have to go to ISO 1600 and shoot at 1/400, f2.8, or, if you are lucky, 1/500th at f2.8.  That is right at the edge of usability for the D2Hs and is actually beyond the best range of the D2H which is very noisy above ISO 1000.  So this week amounts to the best visual week in sports for me all season.  Great light, great emotions and great teams converge to make for an excellent week of photography.

Most of the images in this slide show are done on the D2H and D2Hs.  I took my Canon down and did one game, the Austin High game, but it was mainly a Nikon show this week.  I never turned them up beyond 5 frames per second until the last game I shot on Friday.  I set the D2H to 8 fps for about half of the game.  It was my wide angle body and I wanted just a bit more speed.  The lenses used were the 80-200 f2.8 and the 17-35 f2.8 on the Nikon bodies and I shot with the 70-200 f2.8 and a 14mm f2.8 for a couple of frames on the Canon.  That 14, even though it is an off brand made for Nikon and adapted to Canon, really yields some funky stuff on a full frame body.  There is one frame in the slide show from that combo.  Best of all, there was not a single strobe used in the whole event, just blazing motor drives.  Sweet!

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Brewer coach Ricky Allen protests a call during a game against Decatur High. Photo by Gary Cosby Jr. 1/10/09

Basketball is fairly unique in terms of your ability to see the coaches.  Basketball coaches are pretty emotional people as a general rule.  There are not many Tom Landry types who stand stoically on the sidelines.  Most of the time, they are yelling at players, or, as often as not, officials with gestures and body language.  So you can usually benefit from getting a coaching shot sometime during the game.

The bench on your end of the floor can be covered with a 70-200 all the time and with a short lens once in a while.  In high schools you can usually move around behind the bench during timeouts and get a shot of the coach in the huddle.  Once in a while you can even shoot from beside the scorers table and be really close to the coaches.  This is not something you will have freedom to do in college or pro games so take advantage of your high school games and maybe your small college/junior college games to move around.

The one caution I can give you is that most coaches don’t really want to the publicity.  They want it given to their players and that is really a good thing.  Maybe it is not so true in college and pro where the coach is every bit the celebrity some of the players are.  In high school though, many coaches would much rather see photos of their players than they would of themselves.  While it may not be right for every game it will certainly save your hide when you are having a bad game shooting action.  There are also times when you sports editor will need a file photo of a particular coach and it sure is nice to have one ready to hand him when he asks.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Bounce flash in a very small gym with lots of white surfaces to bounce light from.

Did I fail to mention that it is basketball season again?  This is my least favorite sport to shoot and I guess I am lucky that I don’t cover too much of it any more since I am working mostly day shifts now but over the years I have covered hundreds, if not thousands, of basketball games.  It seems to be the season that never ends.  It does have its moments though and you get some of the best, funniest and even ugliest faces in photos during basketball games.  Way more than in other sports where faces are often obscured and you are very close to the action which increases your chances of good facial expression.  On top of that, if you shoot a lot of high school hoops like I have always done, you are most likely strobing the gym so you have great light on those expressions.

Well, you  have great light assuming that you can position your strobes in good locations and not end up with garish shadows crossing those great facial expressions.  So maybe now is the time for a little lighting primer.  Back in the day I used to always shoot with on camera direct flash which partially explains why I never really liked shooting high school hoops.  No amount of Photoshop can cure on camera flash in a dark gym.  It just is what it is.  Then one day my friend Corey Wilson came to work for The Decatur Daily.  He owned his own set of White Lightning strobes and he used them for every basketball game.  His stuff looked great and my stuff looked like I didn’t care.  I bummed strobes off of Corey every chance I got but that was not a good solution.  I finally convinced the boss to buy us a set of mono-lights we could use and then Corey left us to go to Green Bay and he took his lights with him.  I spent the next season and a half lugging in those AC powered mono-lights, stands and endless extension cords climbing all over the patrons trying to get everything hooked up, taped down and out of the way.

Finally one day, the light came on.  My boss bought me an SB800 to go with the SB28DX I was already carrying and just like that my shoulder began to recover from heavy mono-light syndrome.  Never heard of it?  That is an obvious deformity of the left shoulder leaving a deep indentation between the neck and shoulder joint which results from carrying that ever loving heavy bag in and out of crowded gymnasiums all winter long.  About that same time I discovered Strobist, God bless David Hobby, and my life was transformed.  Now I was going into those same gyms with about forty pounds less gear and getting essentially the same results.

I have made one more evolution in my lighting gear.  Now I am using a pair of Lumedynes I picked up used and they are wonderful.  They have more power than the SBs and are less bulky than the mono-lights.  A great compromise and they work wonderfully.  So how do you position the lights and yourself to make the most out of those small, dark high school gymnasiums.  I am so glad you asked.  Tonight, for instance, I worked in one of the two or three smallest gymnasiums in our area and it is not well lit either.  What it does have is that white padded insulation stuff all over the place in the ceiling and even on the walls above the concrete blocks.  So I could bounce my strobes into the ceiling and shoot basketball in a giant softbox.  Nice!  And it is almost compensation for shooting in a “cracker box” gymnasium.

Normally I have to use direct flash.  Most gymnasiums are a bit larger and less accommodating of bounce flash with ceilings that are either too high or simply not white.  Most high school gyms use the same basic layout.  They have bleacher seating down the sides and open ends with varying amounts of space between the baseline and the wall.  Some gymns have balconies or even tracks around the court area.  Some have full balconies running all the way around the gym and others have balconies just on the sides.  There is even one gym with balconies behind each basket, no baseline area at all and stands down both sides right up to the court.  Setting up strobes then becomes a work in gymnastics.  (Yeah, I planned that one.  Did you enjoy that little pun?)

The basic lighting scheme I use in almost every case where there are no balconies is two lights on light stands in the corners of the gym on either side of the basket I am shooting under.  I place them as high as I can get them and aim them to cross in the lane or at the top of the key.  It depends on how far back I can get the strobes.  The more distance behind the basket I can get the strobes the further up the court I aim them.  In those gyms where there is only a few feet between the basket and the back wall I cross the lights more toward the center of the lane to prevent light loss under the basket.

If there are balconies then I am very happy.  I can get my strobes much higher and I can get them out of the way of the majority of the foot traffic in the gym.  It is a constant worry that someone will trip over the light stands and knock them over or even hurt themselves.  I usually secure my light stands to something stationary with ball bungee cords or even tape.  An alternative to light stands are super clamps that allow you to physically clamp your strobe to something like a rail or a bar.  The gym usually dictates what you can do.  Nine times out of ten I have to shoot my strobes direct but every now and then I get to use bounce and it is really nice light.  Since I will never have the luxury of really setting a lighting scheme like you see in the big arenas I am not worried about darkening down my backgrounds so the bounce light is really nice.

I do not try and totally kill the ambient light in the gym.  A lot of people do and that is fine.  I like to have my ISO up around 800 and in most of our places this gives me a bit of illumination in the background to balance the lighting from the strobes.  I usually aim for an exposure of 1/250 at f2.8 ISO 800.  About 90 percent of all my high school hoops is done this way.  It is my preference and not any rule.  When I began shooting SBs in gyms this worked really well and I have continued it using my Lumedynes.  It all comes down to whatever works for you.  I just don’t like my backgrounds to be real dark because then it looks like photos are over strobed.

The photos with this post area combination of shots done with both bounce and direct flash.  Strobe positions are very similar with the difference being the size of the gyms and the ability or lack of ability to bounce.

Photos copyright Gary Cosby Jr., The Decatur Daily.  The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

It’s a whole new ball game out there. Not just on the playing field, but in photojournalism. In 1986, when I started my first paying job in this profession, I was one happy guy if I could turn in three good black and white prints from a 7:30p.m. basketball game and still make my 9:45p.m. deadline.

Today, that mentality has changed. Today it’s not about quality, it’s about quantity. It’s common place for a photographer to turn in 20 photos from a basketball game, and still meet that 9:45p.m deadline. We have to “feed the online beast” is the new battle cry in a world where newspapers and wire services, mine included, are struggling to find a way to deliver their product and still make a profit.

Yes, we no longer have to drive like mad back to the office to soup film and make prints, those days are gone. Now we sit at press row filing like our pencil colleagues in comfort, pulling out the reading glasses to view the small type of the flip cards as we write our captions.

But, is more better? Does the reader/viewer really want more? Do they want to see your 20 so/so images from the basketball game or do they want to see your best work? Do they really want to see a slide show with pointless audio from the last night’s game? I can’t answer any of those questions. Perhaps a well paid survey company can, but I can’t.

But I can tell you what I think.

I think we need to get back to basics. Yes, photo galleries are great, but make them tell a story. Don’t put four different versions of the same photo in your slide show just to flush it out. Put in the best one, edit your stuff. I would much rather look at 10 really good photos that tell the story of the game, then twenty photos that are all over the map. It’s about quality.

As a former picture editor and Director of Photography at several newspapers, I can remember vividly some of the heated discussions we would have in news meetings over the lead photo for the next days’ front page. No matter the opinion on the photo, in the end, it was always about the content. Was it a good enough photo to warrant carrying the front page of the paper for the next day? That thought process doesn’t seem to carry over to the online world where more is better.

We need to get back to basics of good photojournalism and having that page one mentality. While it’s not 1986 anymore, we need to still think like we did then and put our best work out there.

Photo copyright Rob Carr, The Associated Press. The opinions expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect those of the Associated Press or of my employer, The Decatur Daily.  The basketball photo is one of a sequence of five frames which Rob edited down to the best frame presenting the essence of his theme; one well edited frame is better than several pictures that are just not the right moment.

Basketball is not my favorite sport but tournament time is my favorite sports time of the year. In Alabama, we have the state basketball tournament going on. It is in the regional phase right now and our regional is held in what can only be described as basketball heaven. Take a deep breath and say together with me, available light high school hoops. Not just available light but ISO 800, 1/500th sec at f2.8, color temperature 3800 Kelvin available light! Ahhhhhh! Thank you Wallace State Community College.

This gymnasium is, by far, the best basketball facility I have been in anywhere in Alabama. I can’t speak to the whole state but I have never heard of anything else that rivals it including the Birmingham Jefferson Civic Center which only surpasses it in seating capacity. How a community college got this kind of facility is a testimony to the power of pork barrel politics. I know for sure of three governors from the county this college is located in and two of those governors were from the powerful Folsom family. At any rate, I would be for a whole lot more pork barrel politics if it gave me 1/500th at f2.8 at ISO 800! Alas, some political clout is used to build roads and not arenas.

Back to the court. I love tournament time. There is emotion. There is plenty of drama. There is some excellent prep basketball. Oh, and did I mention that the light is great and I can shoot 8fps if my heart so desires. What a liberation after a season of strobed hoops at one or, on a good day, two frames per second. Oh, oh, and I can shoot with long glass indoors. A 300 f2.8 or even a 400 f2.8 from the stands or from the baseline. Like I said, basketball heaven. Then there are the fans. It is like March Madness only scaled down to the high school level. Most high schools allow their students to attend the games so the atmosphere is charged with lots of teen enthusiasm so features are pretty easy to come by.

This tournament is like the sweet sixteen of the state hoops in the semi-final round followed by the elite eight in the final round. The winners move on to Birmingham for the final four. Alabama has six size classifications for high schools so there are four teams from each class in the tournament in both boys and girls. I’m not real good with math but that equals a whole lot of basketball. Some of these kids I have covered in one sport or another for many years so I know some of them pretty well. My kids played ball with some of them when they were in youth leagues so it is even more enjoyable to be a part of especially when they play well.

And because it can be the last game of the season, and for some kids, the last game of their playing career, the action is intense on the court and the reaction is intense off the court. All in all, it is tough to beat. And did I mention the light? Ahhhhhh, the light! Heaven must be lit a lot like this only there it will probably be like 1/10000000000th second a f5.6 at ISO 10 or something. Until then, I will revel in that little piece of heaven tucked into the back side of Wallace State’s campus.

About the photos: The top photo was shot with an EOS 5D using an 70-200 f2.8 lens. Exposure was 1/640 at f2.8 at ISO 800. I had just a bit of daylight helping on this exposure. The illumination inside the arena is about 1/3rd stop higher during the daytime due to some huge windows in the corners of the building. The lower photo was shot with a Nikon D2Hs at 1/500th sec f2.8 at ISO 800 using an 80-200 f2.8 zoom.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

If you work in the newspaper business and shoot sports at all you know that basketball season is the one season that never seems to end. It is the longest of the prep sports beginning in November here in Alabama and going through until early March. And there are several games a week. This can lead to a lot of photos of the same thing. A jump shot here, a rebound there and it all starts to merge into one big, bouncing,orange blob.

How then do you stay fresh and keep your photos fresh? Ahh, there it is. Staying fresh in the midst of sameness. Is that the challenge of all community journalism? You cover some of the same events repeatedly whether sports or council meetings or festivals. Already you can see that the principles you are about to read will work for you in more than one venue. So hang on. The road to fresh photos begins in your head. Where else?

The easiest thing in the world is to do the job the same way over and over again, especially when you are getting acceptable results. Right? Well, that is right as long as you don’t want to get any better. If, however, your quest makes you push yourself harder and harder each day to make better pictures then you have a challenge. Begin by pretending you have never shot a basketball game before. Look around the gym and find the place where you think it might be cool to shoot from. Okay, there is a reason why most basketball is shot from the baseline. That is where the game “looks” right and you will probably get the highest percentage of good shots. Never the less, why not move around.

The photos in this post are just simplistic movement on my part to get high, get low and move around while still shooting from that high percentage zone. In the first photo, I am on a balcony that is absurdly close to the baseline in this gym. I am able to look almost straight down on the floor from this vantage point and it gives the feeling of a cool perspective without the expense and time of hanging a remote camera in the rafters. (If you shoot high school hoops on tight deadlines you already know that is not a real option anyway.)

The second photo shows a slightly elevated point of view. I got this by climbing to the top of a short set of bleachers in another gym. Why do this? It is as high as I can get in this gym and it has the advantage of clearing my sight lines of people walking in front of me along the baseline and usually helps keep the ref out of the photo. It also cleans up the background when shooting with a medium to long lens.

The third photo gives a perspective I get when shooting from my knees along the baseline. I was fortunate enough to have a good play happen literally three feet in front of me. I am down there right at their eye level and it is an angle people attending the game don’t usually get. Even if they do happen to see the play, it happens so fast that it gets lost in the whirl of the game.

The final perspective is from a camera literally sitting on the floor tipped slightly up. I shot this holding the camera on the floor but it could just as easily have been done by using a floor plate and a remote set up to fire the camera. It is a really simple shot that works sometimes and doesn’t sometimes. This is one of my more successful floor shots. I don’t rely on these but they do provide a nice variety to the long lens/tight shots that I usually look for.

The point is you have to try different things to get different results. A different lens or a different perspective or both will improve not only your pictures, but also your attitude when you have to do this two or three times a week. Have fun and get mobile.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

High school basketball is officially underway and I have one goal for each and every basketball season; NO ARMPITS! You have all seen them, shots of kids with arms raised and the ball over their heads taking a shot. There is no avoiding them, not really, but I will do everything I possibly can to avoid turning one in. That is, of course, the safety shot because you can get it easily and every game which is yet another reason to avoid shooting the armpit photo. The other time the pits show up is on rebounding. That is the second most common armpit shot. Again, I pray for the ball and the kids to go scattering on the floor so I can avoid the armpits. Okay, can you tell I really don’t like the armpit photo?

So, after I have my safety shot of a kid doing a layup, getting a rebound or taking a jump shot I will do almost anything to avoid turning it in. I’ll shoot wide, I’ll shoot tight, I’ll shoot the bench, the coach, the cheerleaders, the mascot or even the doggone referee just please save me from the pitshot. If only we could outlaw armpit photos, oh what a wonderful world it would be. I guess by now you are wondering what the heck is wrong with me. You wouldn’t wonder if you were in your 18th season of prep basketball which starts in November and ends in March and plays three times a week and you had climbed through countless crowded gymnasiums to hang strobes then climbed over even larger crowds to retrieve your strobes when you have to leave before the game is over and all to get yet another hairy armpit shot. Whew!

Prep basketball wears on me like no other season. It is long. Gymnasiums are overcrowded and uncomfortable. People are constantly walking in front of you on the baselines and refs must get paid a bonus to stand directly in front of you. Oh yeah, about three quarters of the way through the season you suddenly can’t get any meaningful shot in focus. The mid-season basketball gremlin invades your AF system and renders it useless for all the good shots and you come back with nothing but hairy armpit shots in focus. Arrrrrrrgh! There is a slight payoff to the basketball season and this is why I keep doing it. There is no more intense action in any sport and you are closer to said action than in any other sport and you can make some amazing action photos with contorted faces and bodies and, once in a while, you make a nice picture without hairy armpits in it. Then there are the post-season tournaments. The best emotion and intensity comes from the post-season basketball tournaments and we are blessed with an excellent facility to shoot the regional tournament in which is lit like heaven. You don’t have to hang a single strobe and you can fire away at 8fps and you feel like a big boy photojournalist and you can forget for a while that you are shooting prep basketball and that you are still quite likely to get a few hairy armpit photos, this time in a sequence because you are shooting a 8fps.

Then you will get joy and sorrow like you don’t see in any other sport because the players are intense and their emotions are right out there on their sleeves, which, of course, they don’t wear because they must display their hairy armpits. In the end, at the state finals in Birmingham, kids will cry when they lose, they will scream with joy when they win and you will get fantastic pictures either way and then, thank God, baseball season starts and they wear long sleeves.

Photos copyright The Decatur Daily. The opinions express in this blog are my own (for sure this time) and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.