While I have not yet posted my “Five Points of View” on the True/False film festival held in Columbia last week, I have decided that this image–much as I might light it–will not be making the cut. Think of it as a teaser for the project to be posted some time soon.
If only that “Q” was a little sharper….I’d like it more. But it still wouldn’t make it in!
I’m at home in Racine, Wis., and have begun the process of filling in the missing keywords, re-ranking, and re-organizing my photographs from fall 2009 in my Lightroom database. I keep finding images that only got one star that should have been two, four star images that should have been three, and so on. When I got to my photos from MU’s homecoming parade, the eyes in this image lunged out at me. I had to work up the image (tone and crop, mostly) and post it up here. I’m sure I’ll uncover a few more “lost images,” and will be sure to post them here.
On Thursday I went over to the Mizzou Arena with Stephanie Hinkle to photograph the University of Missouri’s women’s basketball team demolish Texas – Pan American 83-34. I haven’t photographed basketball much, but have found that I can at least find the occasional feature photo even if my action images haven’t yet developed to the point where I’d like to have them.
I haven’t photographed much basketball before, so I didn’t exactly know what I was doing when I went to photograph Hickman High School’s women’s basketball team play Helias High School. I have no doubt that I am at the bottom rung of the totem pole, but even so, I had fun. Especially when Hickman’s junior guard Aqua Corpening dove down to the floor after shooting for a two-pointer with only a minute left to the game. Just as she’s about to hit the hardwood floor, the ball starts to go through the net.
I also thought that the way that the Helias team was swarming around the same player, Aqua Corpening, was fun in this image:
Usually I’m told to find a good sports feature in addition to the usual sports action. Most of the time I can find interesting people in the crowd, but I had forgotten that a better opportunity would come at half time, when people can go out onto the court and shoot baskets themselves:
Tonight at 7:30 pm, “The Dixie Swim Club,” a play written by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, and Jamie Wooten, will be performed at Stephens College at the Warehouse Theatre (Missourian article here), and again every night through Saturday. I photographed a tech rehearsal last Thursday, and this photograph struck my editor, Stephanie Hinkle. I had dismissed it as it is a photo of the house manager coming onstage to welcome the audience to the theatre and to announce a raffle to be held at intermission, it does have a graphic quality to it. It’s funny, as I’ve been trying to focus so much on content-driven photos that I sometimes forget about having a little fun with graphic elements in the frame. Some day I can better blend the documentary with my other styles of photography, but maybe this is a start.
This evening I spent a solid two hours in the pouring rain to photograph fans outside of Memorial Stadium before tonight’s football game. In particular, my editors wanted a photo for Vox Magazine that would illustrate the tremendous amount of refuse and recycling generated by the tailgaters to football games. Too bad that the assignment seems to have killed my 50mm f/1.4’s autofocus, and possibly my cell phone!
This weekend I photographed a college football game–Missouri Tigers versus the Furman Paladins–along with John Schreiber, for the Columbia Missourian. It was only my third or fourth time photographing football, and my first college game, so it was a little different. I was also using a Canon 600mm f/4 L IS lens from CPS, which made things extra different. But it was a lot of fun, and there’s a web gallery here.
While at the game, I was assigned to get a feature photo of the crew of “Big Mo,” an over-sized drum on a trike that is used to lead cheers of “MIZ–ZOU” at the games, as well as run up and down the end zone with the cheerleaders after a touch down. At the end of the game, David Champlin started dancing with the Golden Girls, who are a more “sparkly” version of the cheerleaders. The result was the photo above. Sadly, it will never find its way into the Missourian, so I’m posting it here for all to see. I suppose it’s better this way.
Secondly, I thought I would post this portrait of Anthony Fitzgerald and Arnold Cromwell, two custodians–one from Hickman High School, the other from Rock Bridge High School–to be featured in this week’s VOX Magazine in the “On-The-Job” section. I was happy with the final select, but also felt that the image below worked fairly well. I do wish I had some more time with them to get a moment between the two, but at the very least I feel that this was a respectful presentation of the two men.
Tonight I photographed a blowout softball game: Rock Bridge High School: 4; Hickman High School: 0. And while I was reasonably pleased with the results of my first attempt at softball in over three years (read: they were OK) one of the outtakes sticks in my mind, so I thought I would post it here. It’s more of a graphic / dynamic image than a story-telling one:
I have finally had a chance to go over all of my images from the Tour de Missouri, as well as my other shoots from the week, and found three images that I thought were particularly interesting but were unpublished–they did not find their way into the Columbia Missourian, or my Blog, for that matter–until now!
I saw this composition with the imperfect reflections of office buildings and the Old Court House as I was walking to the downtown Hilton to pick up my press credentials for the first stage of the Tour of Missouri. This is cropped fairly heavily, so I do wish that I had switched lenses to the 70-200mm f/4 I L IS, but I was in a rush to get to the race before it started without me!