Sycamore At Lakota East Basketball

I really like the commute to the Lakota Freshmen basketball games. The school is only 4 miles from my house. Since the games are normally at 4:30 I miss most of the traffic. Even though the lighting in the gym is not great I love the feel of it. Not a ton of space to shoot from but there is just something about the gym that I like. Even though this game was at the end of January I do remember that it was a rainy yet somewhat warm day. I would take that over the snow that is coming down right now outside my window. Enough about the weather onto the game. The players played with some great intensity and a lot of defensive pressure.

Centerville At Oak Hills Basketball

Feeling almost 100%. So happy about that. I decided to work on a post this morning and realized I am a month behind again. These games were played on January 28th. Centerville made the long trip to Oak Hills for JV and Varsity games. It was senior night for Oak Hills as well. The seniors did get a win for their last home game.

Jump ball.

Defending the post.

Pressure defense leads to...
Turnovers.

Quick Update

Just a quick little post today. I have managed to catch a cold which is not putting me in a good mood. Luckily it happened after all my commitments. I had planned on taking this week to catch up on the business side of things. Plans change.

I read a lot of blogs, websites and books. I love seeing how other people approach things and their results. Not all are photography related but this post is about bad habits of photographers. I can honestly say #1 applies to me. During the fall season I was taking a lot of things with me to games because of the heat. Waist bag, monopod, cooler, extra clothes and cameras. That meant several trips to the car from the house. I started driving down the street with this feeling of forgetting something. Went through my mental checklist and realized that I left my cameras sitting in the house. They are the last thing I always put in the car. Forgot to make that last trip for some reason. How good would it be to show to a game without a camera? Turned around and got them. So glad I was only down the block and not halfway to the game.

I am off to get some more sleep. I will be checking email and processing orders but most likely not answering the phone. Not sure anyone really wants to hear me cough.

Oak Hills Swimming & Diving

While I was at the last swimming meet I got a request from a few parents to come to Senior Day. I try to handle requests whenever I can and luckily I could squeeze this in. There was nothing better than walking into the school and seeing how happy everyone was to see me at the event. I truly love my job and I am happy that others enjoy my work. A huge thanks to the parents who got the meet sheet and marked all the seniors for me. That was a huge help. While I try to get all the swimmers it sometimes is just not possible. The diving board between lanes 2 and 3 just will not move out of my way:) Not sure how many times I almost have run into it or slided my way around it on the wet deck trying to get to another lane to get another swimmer. The meet was held on a Saturday afternoon so I had a lot of natural light coming through the windows which I loved. The images below start with the divers. I am still trying to get better at capturing the divers. More practice on my part would probably be a good thing. Here are the divers.

I like that you can see his face so clearly. Too bad I could not get a high enough shutter speed to get rid of the motion blur of his hand.

A backstroke swimmer breaking the surface after the turn.

Lakota West At Oak Hills Basketball

The Freshmen game was the first of two totally different events I covered on a Saturday in January. These 2 teams have a rivalry building between them. The Varsity teams are normally 1-2 in the division standings. That carries down to the other teams as well. Lots of physical battles throughout the game. Since the game started at 11am in the morning and it was bright out I tried to avoid aiming at the glass doors while covering the game. All that light is great coming through the door except for when it back lights a player. I could do some nice shadows of the players but that is not normally very interesting with regards to basketball. So here are traditional images from the game.

I think defense if important and I like getting shots of the players getting in their defensive stance.
I did not crop this all the way in because I wanted the reflection to remain in the image.
See how the light from the doors blows out the top left side of the image.

A New Look

I always have a list of things I want to accomplish with the business. One thing that has been on the list for a very long time is change my blog. Today I have finally done that. It included an upgrade of the template which is a little scary. So far it appears all my old posts are there and work correctly. Such a good feeling to cross something off my list. Now I have to decide if I want to tackle a site redesign as well. Let me know what you think of the changes to the blog. Also any feedback on a new main site are welcome.

Oak Hills Swimming

I finally made it to a swimming meet in January. If you think gyms are dark, swimming pools tend to be very dark. This one is no exception. There are very few lights and almost none in the center of the pool. When I cover swimming I always think about what I am wearing because I know it will get wet and I bring a towel. I also try to limit my equipment as much as possible so I do not have to worry about it getting wet. Most times I will keep my extra camera body and lenses in a bag around my waist so there is less stuff to worry about. My biggest fear at swim meets is me somehow ending up in the pool. Huge fear! I can take care of myself but my equipment really does not like water. Given the tight conditions at some of the pools I think it is a legitimate fear. Since I like to shoot at pool level for most of the events, I did get pretty wet at times. That is why I have the towel for the camera. My images are from the first 90 minutes of the meet. After that point it got way too dark to get quality images. I think you will be able to see how the light faded during the match from the images. Clicking on an image will make it larger. To see all images from the meet go to my site and click the Games link.

I think this might be my favorite image from the meet. Part luck that the swimmer popped out of the water so close to the wall.

Because of where I am allowed to go, most of my backstroke images are right after the flip at the end of the pool. I wish I could get behind the blocks for an image of the start but then I would be distracting to the swimmers. Something I do not want to do.

Sycamore At Oak Hills Basketball

The Freshmen boys played on January 22nd at Oak Hills. Most of the Freshmen games are played in their South gym but this one was in the main gym. I like the character of the old gym but the main gym gives me more room to move around without getting in any one's way. Here are some images from the game.

How much better would this have been if the banner was Oak Hills?

I did manage to get the mural on the wall in this shot.
A heavily contested shot.
Grabbing a rebound.

Fairfield At Lakota East Wrestling

After a day of photographing the Freshmen Invitational I found myself at Lakota East for some Varsity wrestling. I did get to stop by my office and download my cards from earlier and even started going through the images before leaving again. My husband was nice enough to make me a small meal as well which was appreciated. I was happy to see a meet sheet available at the door. I love knowing who is wrestling against who in each weight class. If I have covered the teams before I have a pretty good idea but once the matches start is nice to have something to write my images numbers on so I can divide the images by weight class later. Plus I just like having a roster. There was only one ref for the meet which is a little strange for Varsity. Normally there are 2 but with all the tournaments going on that weekend I would imagine it was hard to find refs. It was good for me though since I only had to worry about shooting around one ref. Here are my images from the evening meet.

I did a quick blink when I first say this one and then had to laugh. The head almost looked like it should be the wrestler's in the white the singlet.

That Was Close

Last night I had the opportunity to photograph the Oak Hills boys basketball team in their first tournament game of this season. It was held at Cintas. Great lighting! Yeah! Since I was only concentrating on one team I was able to try a few things during the game. Towards the end of the game I set myself up right by the basket support to get some shots from a different angle. (something I have done during the season but probably not as close) Something I always want to capture is a player saving the ball out of bounds. Well, this one was a little to close and not sure what I was thinking. Actually I was thinking, follow the play maybe I can get the player tossing the ball in to a teammate. The below image is not cropped and it was shot at 80mm. That is with my full frame camera so no digital distance added to that. Luckily for me the player stopped his momentum. Not even a great shot but I thought I would show that sometimes wanting a great image overtakes the need for self preservation. More images from the game at a later time.