It’s an annual event. Football season starts and rescues newspaper photographers from summer. Football for me is a sign that the weather will soon cool down, and that’s good enough.
Sandy – Northridge’s Jesse Stauffer (9) leaps over Jordan’s Braden Hammond (2), who just scored a touchdown. At left is Jordan’s Cory Hunt (15) and at right, picking up the ball is Northridge’s Blake Smithing. Jordan vs. Northridge high school football, Friday, August 22, 2008, at Jordan.
I always start out a little unsure of myself when shooting golf. Maybe it stems from early in my career when I didn’t know what I was doing and constantly found myself getting in the way of the game. I may never get over the trauma of a bunch of people waving at me to move out of the way just before a ball slammed into my golf cart, or the time Utah Jazz “center” Greg Ostertag tried to nail me with a ball. But those events were years ago. Now that I know what’s going on, and Ostertag is retired, I can find the storytelling photos.
Devin Daniels faced Darrin Overson in match play. That made things easy. My notes from the day:
Devin Daniels – white cap, white shirt
Darrin Overson – blue shirt
The play was slow. It seemed like every time a golfer lined up a shot a car would go by, a motorcycle would appear, a train would blow its whistle, a cel phone would ring, or a camera shutter would fire, causing yet another delay.
Daniels won, and faces Dan Horner today for the championship.
Krystal Brown racing to the finish, above, while competing in barrel racing at the Utah High School Rodeo State Championships, Heber City.
Rodeo fans are the most patriotic. It’s only before a rodeo that you hear John Wayne recite a poem on how great America is. The shot at left is a detail of the crowd during the national anthem. I worked this scene for a while and never really got what I wanted out of it. The way that little boy was sucking down the drink, I’m hoping it was water.
Wasatch High School’s Forrest Hill just keeps on running for me. One of my favorite photos from last year just took First Place, Sports Feature Photo, in the Utah-Idaho-Spokane Associated Press Association’s annual news contest.
The complete list of winners is here.
Look at all the cameras around Kobe Bryant after the game ended. I guess still photography isn’t quite dead yet. I wasn’t as interested in Kobe as in the Jazz players, namely Carlos Boozer and Deron Williams, so I left the pack focused on Kobe and moved left.
Lucked into Boozer hugging former teammate Derek Fisher. For the rest of these photos I was on the opposite side of each situation from the other photographers, and that’s where I’m most comfortable.
Kobe came over and I just happened to be in place. I followed Boozer and he walked off the court with Williams.
That (above) seemed to be the perfect photo to mark the end of the season. The two best players on the team walking off together with some fans giving them a somewhat standing ovation. A good moment that tells the story.
They’ll be back next year. Season opener in November.
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:
