You want to look for the emotions when you’re shooting a big game. And this one was easy, with the Jazz losing badly throughout the entire game. Plenty of painful moments for fans to re-live.
Who says faces are important? I think these photos tell the story of the game, a horrible effort from the Jazz, without showing faces. They tell the story by showing you the tenacity of the Lakers’ defense. Probably a foul or two in there as well, right?
This is the obvious stuff, the action. In the next few posts I’ll get into some more obscure edits from this game.
A few pre-game shots from last night’s season-ending Utah Jazz loss to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Played around with the camera in my cel phone before one of the Utah Jazz vs. Houston Rockets playoff games. The camera doesn’t fire until about a second after you hit the button, but after a little bit of practice, I got this:
Jazz lost big to the Rockets the other day. I’m just getting around to posting a few photos. Ronnie Brewer after having a call go against him (above) with the Houston fans going nuts.
Mehmet Okur dunks but gets the facial himself.
And Boozer from the sidelines. Wow. This was an ugly game for the Jazz.
A collection of pre-game images from last night’s Jazz loss in Houston.
Carlos Boozer on the bench.
Deron Williams, Carlos Boozer.
I usually shoot this pre-game huddle (above) by holding my camera up over my head. It’s always a lousy shot. So I went low this time. The guy below is yet another reason to not lift your camera up over your head:
Learn from Scott’s example. If you’re going to lift up, tuck in the shirt. Lift and tuck. Or, tuck and lift. It’s early now and it was late last night. My mind is fried. And so is this post. Bye.
That’s one of the last photos I made after game two, as Deron Williams walked to the locker room under the glare of the camera lights after the Jazz win.
As I look quickly through my take, I see hundreds of images that bore me to tears. It’s generic basketball action at its finest, with a few mediocre reaction shots mixed in.
Either I was off, or it was a poor game for photos.
Tonight will be better. I’m not going back to the hotel feeling like this:
Trying to get something a little different before the game. Chatted up a security guard for twenty minutes and finally the Jazz came out into the bowels of the Toyota Center before taking the court. I know the color is funky, but I like it. They did a quick little dance surrounding Deron Williams and they hit the floor…
PICTURE OF THE YEAR: Pepperdine’s Jason Walberg, #12, gouges the eyes of Brigham Young University’s Jonathan Tavernari, #45, during the first half of the game. No foul was called on the play. Photo by Chris Detrick
If you’re not in the insular world of photojournalism, you may not be aware that Tribune photographer Chris Detrick is one of the most talented photojournalists in the world. Really. This spring’s award season has brought Chris a wheelbarrow of awards including a third place for his sports portfolio in the international World Press Photo competition. Chris’s photo above took first place just about everywhere, and today took top honors in Sports Shooter’s Annual Contest. From their site:
“It was a unanimous decision by the judges because it has everything that a winning sports action photo should have – peak action, impact, interesting subject matter, and good composition…” said contest judge Donald Miralle about Detrick’s photograph.
Chris will be representing us at this summer’s Olympics in Beijing.
Another Tribune award in the Sports Shooter contest was an Award of Excellence given to my “Run Forrest Run” photo:
The winners gallery is quite impressive, with many friends of the blog also winning. You can see the rest of the winning photos by clicking here.
Talk about culture shock. I go from nearly two weeks of pioneer dresses on the quiet prairie straight into an NBA arena filled with scantily-clad cheerleaders and pulsing hip hop music during timeouts. My head is bound to explode.
Deron Williams.
Tracy McGrady.
Carlos Boozer happy, Dikembe Mutombo sad. I wish all my captions could be so simple.
Carlos Boozer happy.
Carlos Boozer happy.
Intense Boozer before the game. Jazz win.
This year Skyline won. These post-game celebrations are full of great moments and faces. It’s a shame I can’t stop time (yet) so that I could do some real compositions. These chaotic moments when players go crazy become a frenzy of grab-shots. Both of these frames were made with the camera held up over my head. The key is to know your camera and know your lens, so that you can point it at a scene and know what you’re capturing even when you aren’t looking through the viewfinder.
That’s Skyline senior Jenteal Jackson, letting out a scream after they beat American Fork for the state championship. Key player, key moment. I’ll admit it: Luck.
Richfield – Piute High School’s Krystyna Lamas (left) wipes a tear from her eye after fouling out of the game in the 4th quarter of the 1A State Championship game. Rich High School went on to win the title.
Another series of state basketball championships and the only photos that matter to me now are the storytelling moments. The jump shots, steals, rebounds, and scrambles that I captured at high shutter-speed— you could literally throw them all out and I would never notice them missing.
For those of you like Ben Weasel who don’t care about high school sports, just one more post and we’re out of this series.
This photo (of Sky View’s Natalie Harris in the championship game) reminded me of a time about ten years ago when we had a rash of complaints over our coverage of high school girls basketball. The complaint could be boiled down to this: all of our photos of girls playing basketball showed the girls on the floor scrambling for a ball that had slipped out of their hands, making them appear clumsy and not very athletic.
We pulled up every basketball photo we’d taken that month, from the NBA to the pee-wee’s, and found that the complaint was NOT accurate as far as girls basketball was concerned. What we did notice was that nearly all of the NBA photos we were running were of the same out-of-control moments the readers were complaining about. Guys fumbling the ball, looking stupid, grimacing as they collided with one another. Regardless of the talent on the court, we had produced a gallery of NBA dunces.
I once shot a girls high school basketball game, sitting next to a photographer from another newspaper. After the first quarter of the game this guy started packing up to leave. When I gave him a little grief he said, “This is girls basketball. Nobody cares! It’s going to be a small photo on an inside page, so why bother? I’m out of here.”
I stayed the whole game. At halftime I noticed this table covered with junk food. Muffins, Red-Vines. The team mom wouldn’t let me anywhere near it. It was for players only. Layton won the game. A girl had McFly written on her shoes. I got a great shot.
New topic.
I once worked with a sports editor at another paper who hated to see empty seats in the backgrounds of photos. That’s the main problem he’d see with this one:
There’s often a big difference in the photographs newspaper photojournalists take today vs. the photographs taken historically. Those of today are typically shot tight and clean with crisp expensive long glass. They’re pretty, but in a way we’re suffering from tunnel vision. Often when I’m editing my take from a basketball game I realize that none of my photos show a historical view of the overall scene. Hundreds of action shots seem meaningless when compared to an image like this that captures the climate and culture of America today:
Then the lights go down for pre-game introductions (oh, it’s Piute vs. Escalante for the 1A State Basketball Championship). I can either sit back or shoot. These photographs seem to have no life in print. I shoot.
Raise your hands if you like these kinds of photos.
From my 2007 Portfolio.
Utah Jazz guard Deron Williams (8) pre-game introductions. Salt Lake City – Utah Jazz vs. Golden State Warriors, NBA basketball Saturday night at EnergySolutions Arena.
; 11.03.2007
From the start of the game (Utah Jazz vs. Sacramento Kings), I noticed the fans taking a serious delight in taunting Sacramento’s Ron Artest. It was especially vicious stuff like, “Go beat your wife” and even, “Go feed your dogs!” The guy on the top right of the photo above is twirling his finger making the common gesture for INSANE.
In the second half it seemed to get to him. He got into a couple of shoving situations with Matt Harpring, and pretty soon I was just keeping the focus on him non-stop. Just in case.
At this point he scored and was fouled and started pounding his fist to the crowd. Lots of reaction there. But then he fouled Andrei Kirilenko and was thrown out of the game with his second technical foul. Look at the reaction of the Jazz fans as he walks to the locker room:
The Utah Jazz hosted the Sacramento Kings the other night. I was expecting a good shoot, but it seemed like the jumbotron photographers and their cable-pullers were getting in my way all night long. The cameraman kept leaning out in front of me, and his hefty cable-puller buddy took up 1.5 floor spots. It felt like I was photographing with tunnel vision: on the left I had the refs and on the right I had these guys. It was so bad I had to get up and move to another shooting position. But if I hadn’t been so ticked off, I never would have captured this fine moment:
Above: Brigham Young’s Trent Plaisted (top) and Southern Utah’s Tate Sorenson look up for the rebound. BYU vs. Southern Utah Univeristy (SUU), mens college basketball, Friday, December 21, 2007 at BYU’s Marriott Center in Provo.
Just a few photos from the game last night.
Above: BYU’s Trent Plaisted runs into a forest of defense.
Forest of defense? I didn’t send that caption in for publication. Maybe I should have – it might have attracted some coveted young readers.
Just a thought: what if I got paid based on how many clicks my photos got on the Trib site? I could start creatively inserting popular search terms like “thong” into all of my captions to drive up the traffic. You know, if we got paid by hits, it might start a rash of creative captioning. But I guess the reality would be this- whenever I photographed a high school girls basketball game, I would only shoot players named Britney or Paris (or Jamie Lynn) or other names that were popular with search engines. Okay, this idea is so over. There is no one named “Anna Chakvetadze” on any Utah sports team.
In the second half, little worth watching was happening. But a couple of times guys were diving into the photo box, nearly splitting open their heads on 400/2.8′s.
This guy (Sam Burgess) just about took me out chasing down a loose ball. With a couple minutes to go and a comfortable fifteen point lead, Lee Cummard went flying into the fans diving after a loose ball.
