All of today’s games are postponed till tomorrow due to rain. I can see softball but what’s the problem with playing some soccer in the rain? Bad weather would have made for some interesting pictures. Now I might be stuck here till Sunday…

I’m in Radford, VA for the annual VHSL spring sports championships. My allergies are kicking up (or I caught the swine flu), and the forecast is fairly ugly. I decided to skip trying out any remote cameras as I have had little to no success with them this season. Might as well keep it simple. Today is tennis. Tomorrow is 2 softball games and a soccer match. The best part – all 3 games start at 10 and I am on my own. A couple of years ago we would have had 2 shooters down here but not anymore. As newspaper managers across the country have said in the face of crushing layoffs, do more with less. I’ll let you know how that works out for me…

I spent last Saturday in Harrisonburg shooting the AA state track meet. Aside from surly meet officials and quite possibly the worst case of allergies i’ve ever encountered, it was a fairly uneventful meet. It was originally projected that the Louisa County boys team would win if their winter track results were any indicator. They blew away the compeition in the winter but it looked like they struggled on Saturday. It came down to the final event, the 1600-meter relay. They were in the fast heat and finsihed third there but placed 8th overall as a couple teams in the early heat posted better than expected times. I didn’t really have much of a reaction picture aside from some tired kids sitting around on the ground but the frame never really came together. That’s the trouble with trying to layer a complex picture; either everything comes together perfectly and you have a deep picture or something is out of place and the whole thing doesn’t work. Should kept it simple, I guess!  Anyway, here are two frames, one of the girls 400-meter run state champion and the first handoff in the boys’ 1600-meter relay.

Orange County's Ashontae Jackson launches from the starting blocks in the 400-meter run at the AA state track meet at Harrisonburg High School in Harrisonburg, Va, on Saturday, May 30, 2009. Jackson won the state title with a time of 56.68 seconds. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Louisa's Brandon Payne, left, hands the baton to Brandon Parker in the 1600-meter relay at the AA state track meet at Harrisonburg High School in Harrisonburg, Va, on Saturday, May 30, 2009. Louisa placed eighth in the event, giving them only enough points to place third overall. (Mike Morones/The Free Lance-Star)

Tomorrow the AA state sports jubilee begins at Radford University. So far there is a local tennis player and a softball team. There likely will be a girls soccer match as well. So, this afternoon I’ll make the trek down to Radford. In years past, the area has had a lot more representation and consequently it took more staffers to cover the weekend’s events. Now, not so much. Plus it looks like the softball and soccer will be going on at the same time, so I’ll have to make some decisions as to how  I go about getting to both and still get some storytelling images.

I suppose it is fair to say it may have been a half  marathon but a full dose of frustration.  Aside from getting up before five, I was looking at 100% chance of rain and a course not easily navigated due to road closures. I made sure to bring rain gear for the cameras which usually works pretty well but makes it slightly more cumbersome. But like the marines, the news photographer’s mantra should be ‘adapt and overcome.’ We had 5 people out there shooting and thought we had a pretty good coverage plan. Sadly the rain took its toll on some colleagues’ gear though I lucked out and despite being soaked, the cameras survived!  My major gripe of the day was that according to one of our reporters, the race organizers would not release the registration lists with names and bib numbers, only the results list with those that FINISHED the race. This was problematic as 3 out of the 5 photogs could not locate people in the results meaning that they did not finish or their race tags did not work. Thus a few good pictures could not go in the paper because we could not ID the runners. The Marines apparently said they were packed up for the day but would be happy to help us on Monday. We are a DAILY newspaper,  that does us no good. Marine Corps fail! Anyway, all in all it was an unpleasant day though I think the paper’s coverage was solid. Plus we conducted a brief review afterwards and came up with a plan that will help us improve coverage of not only the marathon but events of similar size and scope like the SoapBox Derby

Here are a few pictures - I only cropped and resized as my trusty Mac bit the dust the other day. I’m hoping the IT folks can salvage the images that were on there. In the meantime I’m using my little Lenovo netbook. It is handy to have in the field but not great for major image crunching!

Check out FL-S coverage including Becky Sell’s pre-race portraits series. Good stuff!

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: