The big game

I love shooting sports. Something about catching that peak moment still gives me the warm fuzzies. The action is always great to capture, and is a large part of the game, but as a jouranlist, you also need to look beyond the action for other moments that are sometimes more telling of how the game is unfolding. For example a frustrated coach screaming about a bad call, a player with their head down after a tough play. The emotion or 'jube' (short for jubilation) and 'anti-jube' as some of us call it.

When you are shooting week after week of high school sports you don't often get emotion from the players or coaches. That is until you reach playoff time.

I have pretty much spent the entire month of March photographing a lot of these playoff games for various papers, and have been able to catch some great games. One of the games was the State Championship for boys basketball out in Wooh-stah. Actually I shot three that day, but I am going to share only one of them today. The first and last games I shot alone, but for the middle game I shot it for another paper and we had three photographers total. One photographer (Dave) was to shoot just action. One photographer (Jim - also the photo editor) was to shoot action from different angles and maybe some crowd stuff, as well as record audio for a slideshow. My job was to shoot features. That meant photos of the crowd, the players reactions, the fans reactions, etc.. And that is what I am sharing with you today. I cant really caption them because I lost my notebook that day.

The fans shot from way above with a long lens. Effect created by zooming out

and photographing at a slow shutter speed.

Watching the game.

And more.

Freethrow.

They won.

We won. Thats Jim down in the right corner.

They did a kick ass job creating an audio slideshow on the go. You can check it out here and
Be sure to have your sound on: http://util.wickedlocal.com/multimedia/watertown/states/