Let’s just start out with this: yesterday was a blast. I had been looking forward to shooting FSU Men’s Hoops since I was asked to do it last Monday. Definitely not my favorite sport to watch or shoot, but it’s all good fun to try and capture the super-quick action, and I enjoy doing something new.
But before we get into basketball…I just want to share the fact that I may be a little bit of a soccer nerd…I followed the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) draft Friday, and watched the three of the FSU Ladies who graduated this year (and that entered in the draft) get picked in the first round!
And then…I followed the Washington Spirit on Twitter, and I think that it’s a little funny that…
The Washington Spirit followed me back!!!! HA!
But now onto basketball…
I really try to get places significantly early. I hate the stress of getting places with only a tiny bit of time to prepare – especially if it’s something like basketball that’s in a huge arena and I’m not too familiar with it all. But yesterday, I showed up an hour early, by-golly, and it was wonderful. I got to park, and take my time walking in, wandering around, and just in general, being not stressed.
And while this is my third game (and you might have a bit of trouble reading the writing on my pass…) this is the first time I’ve actually OFFICIALLY shot for FSU Sports Information.
Onto the court…now, photographing ALL sports, it pays to “warm up,” to follow some pre-game action a bit, get your compositional eye together, and make sure your settings are all together. 
And then – TIP OFF. A phrase that I finally recognized last night. I knew what it was, but had I been asked what started a basketball game, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But here, I present you with the TIP OFF last night.
And then into the meat of the game…
I also thought it was particularly cool that I was asked to hand off my card to some media personnel during half-time. Of course, this meant that I needed to shoot JPEG to one card, RAW to the other…but, in the end, it may have swayed me to do that EVERY time I shoot sports, since the time to process a JPEG is essentially the time it takes me to crop the photo. Whereas RAW files need to be color-corrected, and sharpened in post before they are acceptable to view, and THEN they need to be exported to a JPEG file, which takes forever and a day on my older 2010 MacBook…
But graphics like these, I’m 99% sure are my pictures…the struggle is that I handed off my card before I’d had a chance to go through and look at everything on it, and I don’t feel like it’s really worth my time to go through the images now and figure it out.
THIS graphic, however, IS mine.
Taken from this picture…
And then me comparing them side-by-side…
And then some more from the game…
Quick aside for the above (two) images…
I snapped the image of the other photogs, because I was a little bored towards the end of the game, and I thought it was kind of a cool scene, and I had my fisheye on the D7100 sitting in my lap. Now, clearly it is pretty tight. Everyone shooting seemed pretty chill last night, but when I and everybody else shooting FSU switched sides at half time, we went to sit down, and there was a big mat that someone had left on the sidelines. From what I’ve seen, this is relatively common practice before games, to save your spot. But we got about 1/3 to 1/2 the way into the second half, and the guy hadn’t come over and made use of it. So I and the two photographers that I was sitting next to, had a brief conversation, and we decided it was probably okay to move it. But he came over literally like 5 minutes after we’d moved his mat, and was clearly frustrated that we’d moved it, even though I tried to gesture to him to come sit down and I’d move.
But alas. I talked with him after the game, and he was pretty pissed. It was the guy in the white vest with the earbuds in in that second picture above. He wasn’t furious, as he’s a pro, or at least a very competent amateur, who was shooting for Getty Images. They don’t take crap, and if he was shooting for them, he certainly had to have proven himself before. I still felt bad, and I’m sure moving the mat was a faux pas – but neither professional photographer I was sitting next to said it was bad to move it…But life goes on.
Also, emojis!
Overall – I was very pleased with the images I got, and I hope FSU was also. And I feel like this blog post hasn’t been too rambly and scatterbrained.
Enjoy,
-Colin
