Another Fun Week Of Sports

This little feature on the blog seems to keep getting behind. That is because the weekends have been packed lately. I should move this post, but then everything will shift soon with the spring sports starting. What I am covering here are the three days that I spent in Indy covering the DII Track and Field Championships last week, and a couple of Purdue baseball games. It was a fun week, but more importantly for the business it was pretty lucrative. Every now and then you need this kinds of weeks to get ahead a little.

The End Of Three Long Days

Covering a track meet can be tough. When it is multiple events over the course of three days you have to really prepare and make sure you are always where you need to be. Here was the culmination of the whole thing. For a few straight minutes we were photographing both of the Pitt State teams celebrating team titles. I was a little sore and thirsty, but the photos over the course of the three days were worth it.

Showing Off Everything

For those three days I had a couple of jobs. One of them was to try and capture a bunch of the action. The other job was to show off the venue as much as I could. That meant that I had to keep looking for new angles to get the action in the frame, but with a bunch of the venue as well. The venue was not set up well for a big wide photo. I had to kind of make photos like the one above to show off small bits of it.

Finding Little Moments

I love little photos like this. You have the signage of the event, but with an athlete warming up in front of it. These are fun photos to make early on. You get something in before the event starts, and you get more photos of the signage.

Finding The Emotion

With things like the high jump I usually let them go for a while before making photos of them. I can photograph the other events while the bar gets a little higher. Once that bar gets high enough the emotion starts to come out with every jump. For what I was doing last weekend that was perfect.

Having A Little Fun

At times photographing the podium can be tedious. You are hoping for some emotion or something different to spice things up. This definitely qualified for that. It was a fun little moment that helped tell the story of the weekend.

A Great Finish

This was the last race of Friday. It might also have been the best race of the weekend. The top four finishers in the men’s DMR all set NCAA DII record times. Imagine setting a record and finishing fourth. It was an amazing race that led to some of my better photos of the weekend. For the finish I tried to line myself up with the finish line and the crowd hoping for something good. I was rewarded with an awesome few frames of the winner emoting to his teammates.

A Familiar Face

For what I was doing I never needed to pick up a heat sheet. It was all about finding moments and showing off the venue. Then I saw a familiar face in the weight throw. I covered Alaina Omonode when she played basketball at West Side. She was a force under the basket. It was cool seeing her a few years down the road doing her thing on a national stage. She finished fifth in the weight throw medaling for Grand Valley State.

Telling The Whole Story

Photos like this one are fun because they help tell the story of the weekend, but they are also generic enough that they can be used to promote future events. I spend a while looking for a set of hurdles set up to make this photo, and I lucked out here to find one that was.

A Fun Weekend

It is hard to boil down three days of track into a few short paragraphs. I did have a blast in Indy though. Track is always fun to cover. Everywhere that you look someone is doing something amazing. Everyone there has specialized in what they are doing, and they have it down to a science. It is always fun to try and show that.

Working On Things

I will be honest. At a baseball game like this one I am not going to sell many images. I have to make something very special for it to sell. I am also not there for game action. I am just having some fun and working on some things. I am trying to put myself into situations where I should fail. I am trying to photograph things too tight to make myself get a little better for when things are more meaningful. Everything is about getting better. I am hoping for about twenty good images for Instagram from a game like this one.

Thinking About Things Differently

Last spring I was still making full galleries for every game that I attended. When you include both of my kids playing softball those photos started to add up. I got really burned out, and it really started to affect my creativity. This spring I think that my gallery will just be the photos that I am thinking about for Insta. There is no sense spending that extra hour editing for no real reason. Those extra photos really don’t have a purpose, and they just take up my time. Hopefully that will help me keep going a little this spring. I have never been burned out like that before. I have always thought that there wasn’t such a thing as too much sports. I found out the hard way that there was.

A Close Play

Here I actually lucked out to be in the perfect spot to make this photo. Normally I have just moved and have an on deck batter or an umpire in the way. Here I had an unobstructed view of the runner just as he touched home plate.

This was a fun week for me. As I said it was fairly lucrative and it will go a long way to keep this thing going. I really wouldn’t mind a few more of those. I really had fun at track and I could have posted many more photos. As we move on this spring my opportunities will dwindle as I cover my kids. Getting some last few jobs in before that starts will help a lot.