Catching up

So obviously I have failed miserably at keeping this blog updated lately. It's not that I haven't meant to, but you know things can get a little busy when you are constantly traveling between two cities and getting used to a new job. I figured I would start again however and post some of my most recent work, and perhaps keep it up enough to do a week-in-review type post every week. This week I have a couple from Thanksgiving when it snowed heavily here and then my favorites from last week.
All images copyright The Midland Reporter-Telegram.


This one is of the statue of Lady Liberty on the front lawn of the county courthouse downtown. Like any trained dog or photojournalist I know that when I wake up and it is snowing in West Texas, I will need a weather photo. In fact I will probably need two weather photos just to be sure. I went out early on Thanksgiving to get these since I figured someone from the paper would be calling me wanting a snow photo eventually and if I already had one that would make my life just that much easier. Plus I could shoot what I wanted and take my time without the rush of a deadline.


This is a Turkey Day photo as well. We knew that two of our larger teams in the playoffs would be practicing that morning. I was excited to shoot football practice in the snow since that doesn't happen to often around here.

Here are a few from this past week:


This first one is a portrait of two brothers who play football on the same team, which also happens to be the team their father is an assistant coach for. I included it because I am trying to better both my portrait and my lighting skills and I feel this one was a step in the right direction. I used one off camera strobe at camera right hooked to a pocket wizard (that's a brand/type of radio trigger used to shoot with your flash on a stand, hanging from a tree, tied to a lama, etc. etc. for the uninitiated). This light was mainly used as a fill light since I had some nice sunlight coming in from behind me that was perfect for my main light (as sunlight often is).


This photo is of a championship ring presentation ceremony for the local junior college basketball team. It's pretty cool shooting photos of a team that included several members of last years national championship team. With quality athletes come opportunities for quality photos if you ask me.


This is one of my favorite basketball photos I have ever taken. The intensity on the faces and the little details like the players tattoos just make this one of my favorites. It helps that we have some awesome strobes up in the ceiling to illuminate the player and throw the background into darkness. This has got to be one of my favorite parts of the job so far. I have always loved shooting basketball, and wanted to light the floor like this but was on too much of a students budget to afford to do it. My newspapers setup is really great. Shooting with the big lights does have it's downsides though. You have to get to the location early and climb up to the catwalks to manually turn the strobes and radio triggers on, and you can't exactly motor drive your way through a ton of frames as the lights need to recharge every few shots. My camera syncs with the flash at 1/250th of a second also, which is a little slow for sports, although this is a problem for most pro digital camera's nowadays. The good things is that the flash helps to stop the action, and I can shoot at f/4 or f/5.6 to get a little better depth of field and not worry about the crowd being in focus since they are underexposed from the 7th or 8th row on up.

Yeah, I really like to shoot basketball at my new job.