On most Friday nights, you will find us at a football game. We cover local sports for the newspaper just for the fun of it. If we get a chance to photograph some of our seniors in action, we include those action shots into their senior albums.
We also print up our best sports shots into big poster prints. Parents just love being able to have one or two really good prints to remember their son’s or daughter’s athletic career….The kids love it even more.
Nine-man football fields are notoriously dark. We use big lenses designed especially for low-light, but we are still limited to the first half. As darkness falls, we use slower shutter speeds and pan the camera with the action. If we are lucky, we can keep the players face tack sharp with lots of motion blur as in this image of Rob, one of our seniors from Rutland.
Just to show you a little closer view of Rob, I zoomed in to show all of the detail you can’t see in the image above.
Football gives lots of opportunites for great pictures, BUT it also can be dangerous: When you are out on the sidelines, you can suffer grievous injury if you do not pay attention to your surroundings. You always have to be aware of people around you at the start of a play. When the offense runs a sweep, the sidelines are where the play will end – usually where my feet were standing 5 seconds before. Braxton almost got me twice tonight.