My Favorite Volleyball Photos Of 2023

This year felt kind of like last year. I did not get to photograph as much volleyball as I would have liked. It seemed like I always picked good matches when I was able to make it to games thought.

The year started with a fun run for the Harrison boys volleyball team as they won their first home match and the sectional championship. Here are a couple of my favorite photos from that sectional championship match.

My fall volleyball schedule started with Creighton’s visit to Holloway Gymnasium. In the past I was very active with opponents early in the year, but this year I was booked except for this match. For the first time ever I didn’t make it to a single game of the Stacey Clark tournament. That is hard to believe. I never missed a match of it in the past.

My 400mm lens has not been working properly for a while now, but I still wanted to try and get some of the classic above the net photos that I used to make. I took it to Harrison one night to try and make them. I have to manually focus it which is not the easiest at volleyball. When I hit though it was very good. This is one of my favorite photos from when it worked. This coming year I hope to have the Sony 300mm lens which should be perfect for these types of photos. It will also be about 30 pounds lighter than that old Canon lens.

I love these little moments at the net. I always think that the peak action of the set is not as interesting as other moments during the set. Here though the peak action is the most interesting part of the photo.

This was a photo that I wanted to try again later in the season, but I never got around to it. I like the idea with the reflections, but I wanted to do it again when the senior banners were on the wall. It meant a lot to me that they asked me to do the banners for them, and that made me want to attend more games than I normally would have this year. Most of the time I walk into a gym and see other peoples work on the banners. It was really cool to see my photos up there.

Volleyball is such a fast sport. It is not the easiest to photograph and make peak action photos. Here I loved the play and the reflection below the athlete. These digs are something that I don’t see very often so it was very cool that I was on this player to make this photo.

I love this senior night moment at Harrison. I could not make the start of the match, but I got there as soon as I could to get some of this emotion as they played their last match in May Gymnasium. These are the little moments that make the gallery fun to look at.

The rest of this list comes from the NCAA tournament games at Purdue in early December. I had only photographed two matches in Holloway this year before the tournament started. Their games seemed to go up against Harrison so I always chose the team that had me do their banners. I had asked for a pass so that I could finally photograph Purdue in their gym, but Fairfield called for me to photograph them. I love the emotion here in these photos. The first photo was from when they won the first point of the match. The second photo comes from a key moment late in a set to keep the set going.

I had spent the entire morning of this day making reflection photos in the photos during a rainstorm. That reflection idea kept going that night as well. I saw their bench celebrating and came up with this idea. I liked the thought of getting the NCAA banner and the team into the reflection.

The last photo that I will look at was this great celebration photo that I made while photographing Marquette in the NCAA tournament. This is the third time that I have photographed Marquette in the NCAA tournament. It is starting to become tradition at this point on the odd years. I love the emotion here along with the NCAA banner in the background.

This was a short volleyball season for me, but a very fun one. This is the fourth time that I have been lucky enough to photograph the NCAA volleyball tournament. That is always some great volleyball. I think I doubled the amount of volleyball matches that I photographed from the previous year. Next year it would be nice to do that again. Volleyball is a fun sport to cover.