Week in Review

After taking more than a week away from the blog I have returned with a few new stories to tell and a couple of photos to share.

Picking up where I had left off on the previous post, last weekend was a little hectic. I spent four nights in a row in the Qwest Center shooting the season finale for the basketball team, the Stampede, the season opener for the arena football team, the Burn, and two playoff games for the AAA hockey team, the Steelheads.

Unfortunately I didn’t really come away with anything that’s worth writing about, however, I did happen to shoot a couple of other interesting assignments which were more fruitful.

This photo was taken on Sunday afternoon at Boise State during a memorial tribute to local legend and cultural icon Jimmy Jausoro. These little performers were just a few who were dressed in their Basque regalia to perform traditional Basque dances.

After logging another full day on Monday April 23rd, I packed a bag with some clothes and set off on a five-hour drive straight north to spend the weekend with my sister and brother-in-law in Moscow, Idaho. As I traveled up highway 55 through such wonderful towns as Horseshoe Bend and McCall I was blown away by the beautiful country I was passing through. Gorgeous canyons with screaming whitewater broken by the occasional sleepy 200-person town with charming Café’s, fruit stands and self-serve fuel stations.

So after spending most of Wednesday recovering from Tuesday night the weekend came and went and it was time to head back to work. Of course I couldn’t make the nearly 300 mile trip without making a brief stop off at Hoot’s Café, which lies on off the Salmon River by only a couple hundred feet and is closest to the booming metropolis of White Bird, Idaho which has a population of 138. Hoot’s features wonderful breakfast cakes with homemade syrup and tasty toast with homemade jam. It was a great stop.

I returned to work on Thursday feeling energized looking forward to getting back to business. I ended up shooting a college softball game, a community art show and a high school baseball game. I was able to come away with a couple of photos that I liked, my favorite of which being the diving attempt to stop a line drive by a shortstop posted below.

So it’s Saturday, which means sports a plenty. Today I’ll be running between Boise State Tennis, a Body Building Competition in Boise and rounding out the day with a Boise Burn game at the Qwest Center. Or at least that’s the plan.

If you’d like to see some additional work from the past two months, check out my recent update at…

www.sportsshooter.com/clitchfield

So yeah, that’s it for this post… Thanks for stopping by!

Catching Air

Well another weekend has come and gone and after another crazy break, it's back to work. Thursday was a relatively slow day for me, which is always nice when leading off another week of work.

I began Thursday by making a few photos from a graduation at a local trade school early in the afternoon. I then made my way over to Skyview High School to shoot a five o'clock softball game.

After shooting about 5 innings from the shingled roof of the home-teams dugout, underneath gloomy overcast skies, the sun broke and I got a couple good innings of nice light and long shadows. Unfortunately the action I was looking for never came about, however, the sudden break in sunlight provided me a nice boost in spirit and I left the game feeling inspired.

So I then decided to check out this skate park that had caught my eye while commuting to an assignment earlier in the week.

The great thing about shooting skaters is that they are always willing to have their picture taken, and being a former "skater-dude" I always enjoy swapping stories of stunts attempted and injuries sustained.

The guy in this photograph was quite a character. His name was Cory Smoot and he had some entertaining stories to tell, and since I had three hours left in the day, I plenty of time to listen and laugh. Having been born and raised in Nampa and proclaiming to be the authority of Roosevelt Park, Cory gave me a pretty lucid history of the park, as well as his stance on the cities abundance of soccer fields and lack of BMX parks.

Just another feature really and technically speaking, the photo could have been stronger. I would have liked to have taken advantage of the nice light by incorporating a nice shadow into the photo but the 2 ft. latter I keep in my car didn't quite get me up high enough to accomplish that.

Looking ahead, this weekend should be another fun one. The Boise Developmental league basketball team has a playoff game Friday night and on Saturday I will get to shoot my first, and Boise's first arena football game. So check back in in a few days...

Thanks for stopping by. Until next time...

Concerts Galore

Well it’s been a few days since I’ve posted any new work, but I think that the delay has been with good reason. On Wednesday my sister made the five-hour trip down from Moscow, Idaho to attend a conference in Boise. It’s always fun getting a chance to see you siblings and while both her and I were pretty busy, we did find the time to make a pilgrimage to arguably the most wonderful breakfast bistro in the Valley. Goldy’s isn’t anything that fancy, but the food… Incredible. Oh and there were also multiple trips to Target, as to be expected.


Along with a delightful dinning experience, I had a few additional exploits from this last week that I think are worth mentioning.

Starting Monday April, 9th I had the opportunity to cover the Caldwell Centennial Band on the lovely campus of Alberton College of Idaho. The band was made up of about 40 members of all ages from the Caldwell area who all came together in the name of Jazz. Didn’t ever think of myself as much of a fan of classical jazz, but after listening to this ensemble I’ve become a closet devotee. It was just one of those wonderful assignments that left me feeling very thankful for the work that I do. Getting to experience so many divergent slices of life which under “normal” circumstances I may never even know about.


This week I also attended a concert at the Egyptian Theatre in downtown Boise. Really interesting venue. The headliner was an Irish band called The Frames, which I thought was somewhat of a dark departure from everyday folk. Anyway, it was a pretty fun and the lighting they used was a little abstract so it made for some different photos.




So I guess that’s really all I’ve got for this post. I apologize for feeling a little uninspired, I just housed a massive bowl of ice cream and am feeling a bit lethargic.

Until next time…

Features and Combustible Baseballs

Well it’s Tuesday and for some that may mean another long day at work, but for me Tuesdays are the start of my weekend. Unlike the majority of to world, which operates on a 9-5 Monday through Friday work week, my days don’t start until 2 p.m. and I take my weekends on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Some may think it is a bizarre schedule and at first I felt the same way, but after a month I have really found myself enjoying the extra down time in the mornings and the casual nature of the office on weekends.

So the collection of work I’m posting today has come from the past two or three days of work, starting with this photo, which I made in the so called “Golden Hour” late Sunday afternoon.

Sunday was a pretty slow news day for me so after taking care of a few tasks in the office I set out in search of making a nice stand-alone photo. For me this about the most challenging thing I do in a given week. It generally calls for me to peruse the Valley in search of somebody out doing something interesting and inherently visual. The real challenge here, for me, is creating an image that communicates clearly and is eye catching or graphically appealing. In other words, making a photo that allows the viewer to see some average everyday event in a different way.

Take a look and see if you think I accomplished just that…



The second photo I wanna share is a portrait that I took Monday afternoon at Skyview High School in Nampa. The story here is about this high school pitcher, Jeff Denton, who has had a remarkable start to the 2007 season, pitching 42 strikeouts and only 9 walks in the 32 innings that he’s pitched. In other words the kid has got a laser-rocket arm and so I really wanted to send that message to the reader.

I have to say, doing sports portraits is one of my greatest and most exciting challenges in photojournalism. Meeting someone who has some unique skill or has achieved some noteworthy accomplishment, then trying to trying to represent it in a distinct personality portrait. Plus I like using big artificial lights.

I didn’t have a whole lot of time to get set up, as common when shooting portraits of athletes, but I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted so the whole shoot didn’t take more that five minutes once we got rolling. I was using one strobe with a medium sized soft box to light the subject and because it was such a windy day I had the coach hold it in place for me. As far as the effect with the ball, I won’t divulge my secrets but I can tell you that the kid’s incendiary fastball wasn’t the only thing used to ignite the ball.



I really thought it could have been executed a bit better but considering all of the extenuating circumstances I thought it turned out ok.

So that’s that… One more week in the books, and since the sun is shinning I’m going to go out and play!

Thanks for visiting, and feel free to contact me with any questions or comments. Until next time…

Just the Beginning

After a somewhat tumultuous transition from life as an unemployed college graduate, to relocating to a city I had never before been to start a new job, things have finally begun to settle down. But for you to know where I am you need to know where I have been…

It has been almost four months since I walked away from Iowa State and in that short time I have experienced the proverbial roller coaster of post collegiate emotions.

Spending countless hours at Copyworks, Kinkos and UPS stores writing, printing and packaging application materials I quickly became accustom to the mix of classic 70’s and 80’s music that plays throughout the stores, and found myself enjoying the witty banter between the often overworked and overly impatient employees. Three weeks of living in my grandma’s spare bedroom and continuing on with this routine I began to long for something different.

While remaining resilient in my efforts to avoid moving back in with my parents, I opted to travel west and move in with my sister and her husband in their home in Moscow, Idaho. While in “The Scow”, as it is affectionately referred to, I spent my time between meals and sleep walking their dogs, reading, and embracing the local “crunchy” culture.

Although this Moscow was considerably milder than it’s Russian counterpart, I still had a number of opportunities to go out and play in the snow. Trips to Silver, Brundage and a more memorable journey to the Canadian resort known as Fernie – which, simply put, involved uni-suits, Extreme Lightning Reaction, and overuse of the word EH.



As days came and went I began to believe that the job market in journalism was far to competitive and that it may be wise to begin looking elsewhere. And so I continued to cast applications far and wide until the middle of February when I received a call from the Chief Photographer at the Idaho Press Tribune, a paper that I had applied to over a month before.

Long story short, after interviewing at that paper I knew that it was a good fit and when I was later offered the position I didn’t hesitate to accept. Now it has been a month of work at the Press and things have gone great. Besides a few of the growing pains that come with moving to an entirely new city, it has been a rather smooth transition.



Now I look forward to continuing my development as a journalist through my experience at the Press, as well as hoping to meet some new friends here and there. Oh and I am also hoping to learn Spanish very soon so that I can communicate with the folks that I meet who don’t happen to speak English.

As far as this blog goes I have set the somewhat lofty goal of posting every couple of days with a new photo that I have taken on the job, as well as details about any exciting escapades from my life.

So stay tuned…