basketball

A little late with this one since it happened right before Thanksgiving but I got my second basketball game of the year—and while I shot plenty of games while I was with The Daily Iowan, the quality of my gear has improved significantly since then and so have my photos. As an aside, I do believe the photographer is more important than the gear—but there does comes times (and sports is one of them) where the gear really does matter.

One note and a lesson relearned: at one point during the game, an Iowa player landed awkwardly and went down to the court. A voice in my head said “gee, better get some shots of that” although at the time it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Later in the second half, the same guy was on the bench with his knee iced (me: “huh, guess he really did get hurt.”) and during a timeout, I fired off a few more frames. Turned out, he’d suffered a torn MCL and was done for the year. And in an otherwise unimportant early season basketball game, what was storyline (and dom photos?). Yup.

Roundball Shortfall

Had the chance to get back to sports photography last night when I shot the Iowa-Michigan State game. Unfortunately, things didn’t go exactly as the Hawkeyes planned and after a gritty first half , the game got away from Iowa early in the second and they wound up on the losing end. Still, I got what we needed for the paper (always the first goal) and, if nothing else, Tyler Cook (Iowa’s #25) is always a fun player to photograph.