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…