One Shining Moment

Sports Photo of the Day

With the NCAA Tournament getting ready to start tomorrow (the play in games count, but it just doesn’t feel the same) I thought that I would post a picture from the first year that I saw the tournament live. In 2009-2010 Purdue was on a roll. They were one of the best teams in the country, and poised to take a #1 seed into the tournament. Then in one bad fall in Minnesota all of that came undone. Purdue forward Robbie Hummel tore his ACL, and with only a few games left in the season Purdue was trying to find a way to replace him. The team was embarrassed by Minnesota in the Big Ten Tournament leaving many pundits to predict an early exit by Purdue in the NCAA Tournament. Purdue beat Sienna in round one to prove them wrong, but of course the pundits struck again saying that Texas A&M would send them back to West Lafayette. I was in Spokane, Washington to watch both of those games. I don’t know what kind of fan that doesn’t have anyone on the team travels across the country to watch a team that looked to be reeling, but I did just that.

The photo above is one of my favorites that I have ever taken at a sporting event. Purdue was 11 points down in the second half to the Aggies, but they came storming back to force overtime. With under ten seconds left in the overtime period Chris Kramer drove to the hoop. He used the rim to put this shot in giving Purdue the lead with 4.2 seconds left. Purdue survived a last second heave to advance to Houston to face Duke in the Sweet Sixteen. What I like most about this picture is the fact that I was much more nervous than any person should be at a game. I think that the adversity that Purdue faced that season along with the fact that everyone was betting against them pulled the Purdue community together. I was also sitting in the Purdue section at the stadium which is much more charged up for the game. I was shaking near the end, but for some reason I was fine when I looked through my lens. I don’t even know if I pushed on the shutter button or my finger hit it nervously. At any rate I made this picture showing the determination of Chris, and the way that he used the rim to his advantage. This is one of those pictures that I lucked out on because I did not fully understand my camera at the time. Linked here is a picture that Sports Illustrated photographer Robert Beck made at the exact same moment. I thought that it was kind of neat to see the play from another angle.

Technical Data

I really wanted to see what I could do to make this jpeg pop a bit more. At the time that I took this I was still guessing at settings not fully understanding my camera. I applied the Matt Kloskowski Lightroom sports preset to this image to see what it would do. From there I carefully tweaked the sliders to avoid too much noise. To get rid of some of the noise I used the built in noise reduction in Lightroom. Too much of that though would have smoothed everything out so I tried to walk the fine line there. Overall I was happy with the result with the fact that this was a jpeg.