I was shooting a baseball game at Courtland High School the other day. It had been a while so I was feeling a bit rusty. It was slated to get started at 7:30 but Courtland’s field is situated in such a way that if there is no cloud cover the sun shine directly into the batter, catcher and ump’s faces. So we had a sun delay to wait for the sun to go down sufficiently. I shot this photo in the first inning when there was still a bit of sunset left. I love the way the D3 handles color. My only gripe with the picture is that I should have given it a bit more depth to help define the shape of the batter in the top right more.

2008-2009 All-Area swimmer Meredith Cavalier

North Stafford's Megan Melendez, All-Area Gymnast

2008-2009 All-Area basketball players of the year, Courtland's Josh Hairston and Colonial Beach's T.T. Carey

Mountain View's Thomas Porter and Kaitlyn Davis are the 2008-2009 All-Area winter track athletes of the year.

Colonial Forge senior Mike Garafalo is the 2009 All-Area Wrestler of the Year.

2008-2009 All-Area co-swimmer of the year Trevor Carr

Stafford High School's Marquel Davis,

Well, it’s that time of year again - All-Area Sportraits. I’ve been shooting a ton of these lately and I was hoping I could pass these to a coworker to see what he could do with them. Sadly he got laid off and bought a plane ticket to China. I remained in Fredericksburg to herd cats coordinate with high school kids to shoot some pictures. I’ve been running on fumes when it comes to these shoots but I think a couple of these turned out OK, aside from one kid not showing up and another refusing to put on a uniform. Nothing makes me feel better than getting big-timed by a teenager!  We also have to shoot group pictures of the All-Area teams. I will be the first to say if portraits are a weakness of mine, then group portraits are the weakest of all. The lighting is no problem but I always have trouble organizing the shape of the group. As the seasons roll on, we tend to switch between mugshots of each athlete or a group shot. I think the group shots look better but the mugs are way easier.

All-Area Gymnasts

I headed down to Richmond yesterday to cover Courtland High School take on Salem in the Group AA Division 4 state title game at Virginia Commonwealth University. Usually these state games make for compelling action and more importantly, reaction pictures. Yesterday, not so much. Courtland pretty much manhandled the Spartans all game long. Plus they started at 9:45pm, adding an undercurrent of stress to make the paper’s deadlines. I got some halfway decent action but the reaction was fairly muted even though it was the program’s first-ever state title. The outcome was apparent by the end of the first half.Here are a few favorites:

Stephen A. Smith was on ESPN a few minutes whining that sports organizations don’t seem to be feeling the effects of the recession. For one thing, he cited the cost of the New Yankee Stadium at $1.6 billion. Well, first, New Yankee Stadium began construction in 2006, a long time before the beginning of this recession. Second, how many jobs did that construction create or maintain?

Smith went on to complain about the salaries being paid to various professional sports players. Uh, out of curiosity, how much does Stephen A. Smith get paid per year and what does he contribute to society? Bombastic whining?

According to one website, ESPN Inc.’s revenue in 2004 was $3.2 billion. That’s double the cost of New Yankee Stadium in case you were curious.

Not to mention that those professional players that make however much money a year with salaries and bonuses; how much do they pay in taxes? How much of that money that they are paid is used to create other jobs? When a player gets a signing bonus and moves to a new city, he has to find a place to live, furnish the new place, and more than likely purchases a new vehicle to drive around the city.

And the funniest part of his segment was after he concluded his whining, he walked down into a subway station supposedly to get on a train. Even the announcers on ESPN had to laugh at this, stating something around the lines of: “the recession must be really bad if he’s taking the subway now.”

I’ve been on night shift this week shooting various regional basketball games. I made the decision to light most of the venues using SB-800 strobes at 45-degree angles to the top of the key. If you can get your lights high enough, you can produce some nice-looking images. However if you’re not careful, you can get some pretty ugly shadows. Sports Illustrated it ain’t but it will do on a budget. For the first part of the season I wasshooting Nikon D3’s with no lights, just the ISO cranked up. It was nice to be able to bang off a bunch of pictures though the downside was that the images looked kind of flat. So, I brought in the lights which give you a little punch but unfortunately kind of limit your movement as you can get some serious lens flare if you are not careful. With the state tournament coming up, I think I might go back to the no-light set-up if only because the pictures all look the same. Well lit maybe but definitely redundant. Anyway, here’s a slideshow of a week’s worth of high school hoops:

Slight language warning:

Richmond Times-Dispatch:

The Washington Redskins will bring in unsigned punters Tuesday to audition for the job currently held by rookie Durant Brooks.

Brooks drew the ire of fans with a short punt from the end zone in the third quarter of Sunday’s 19-17 loss to the St. Louis Rams. After the Rams failed to move the ball, they were still in range for a field goal.

They’ve been mathematically eliminated for the wild-card slot.

They’re 51–85 if you haven’t been paying attention.

What moron schedules a game against #3 USC? How insane do you have to be?

I was predicting a 30 point win for USC — they managed to win by 45! ESPN:

Mark Sanchez threw three touchdown passes in his first game as Southern California’s true No. 1 quarterback and the third-ranked Trojans rolled over Virginia 52-7 Saturday.

The Trojans lead 21-0 after just 11 minutes and weren’t tested, allowing coach Pete Carroll to keep things simple in advance of a home game against No. 2 Ohio State in two weeks.

Virginia had former stars Tiki and Ronde Barber and Chris Long in attendance and a Scott Stadium record crowd of 64,947 on hand, but the Cavaliers had minus 15 yards on their first three offensive series and needed 25 yards in penalties on their lone scoring drive.

In other news, #17 Virginia Tech lost to East Carolina (who?) 22–27.

Maryland beat Delaware 14–7.

Navy beat Towson 41–13.

Apparently, the Olympic village resembles a huge frat party once the athletes are done competing. Thousands of young, incredibly fit people coming off a huge emotional high (or low) like to drink and shag. Who’d of thunk it?