happiness is...

after a weekend of snow-blown double-headers, frozen fingers, and wind-burned cheeks happiness was a sunny, 70 degree day-off, a long run on the river, slightly sunburned shoulders, and eating fresh fruit on my porch watching the sunlight filter through white blossomed trees. it takes so little sometimes.

back on the swing shift the next few months so sports is back in the rotation. i'm glad for the dose of outdoors. my baseball timing is off, not that it was ever ON in a major way. i'm late to plays and my intuition for choosing a baseline to shoot from is opposite of the play action. arg.



this poor kid had a chance to set a new unofficial NCAA record for most scoreless innings pitched. He had 42-ish scoreless innings with the record at 47. He gave up 5 runs in the first inning. d'oh. at least the stress was over after the first.



a catch at the wall.



an error in the infield put a runner on first.



and then there are the photo gods. i felt them smiling on me for the first time in awhile.

i shot the above softball photo from the roof of the press box. i got there early and watched the track meet going on next door. the hurdles were set-up for the 110 meters and i couldn't resist the clean angle. i shot the competitors blasting through the frame and then this kid falls into the frame from the left. he banged his knee on the previous hurdle and writhed on the track for a few seconds before the trainers could get to him.

BYU junior Justin Bingham clutches his knee in pain after falling during the men's 110-meter hurdles at the Tom Botts invitational at the University of Missouri.



now that i write this, it seems sadistic to say the photo gods were good to me by causing this guy pain, but that's not quite what i mean. so much of sports photography is capturing the peak action of any given event. it's a hard thing to do, but with practice it becomes routine. there are gobs and gobs of sports photos (see: www.sportsshooter.com) that are on-peak, with clean backgrounds and even play-of-the-game significance, but they end up all looking the same to me. what makes good sports photos, to me, are the ones with emotion, or as jim merithew likes to remind me, when things go terribly wrong. as most of us were never the star player on a high school or college sports team, we can all identify with losing.

photo god gifts are also about being in the right place when the unexpected happens. i struggle with my intuition for these sorts of things. i find myself on the wrong side of the gatorade a lot. so it was nice to finally be in the right place at the "right" time. poor kid. i wonder if sending him a print would make him feel worse.

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local ghost hunters packing for a trip to st. joseph, mo a three hour + drive away. it drives me crazy when photo assignments are completely divorced from what the actual "action" is. this article was set to run the day before the team did a ghost hunt in columbia. would it kill us to wait another few days to get actual photographs of a ghost hunt? seriously frustrating. i try to hustle, but sometimes there's no fighting the deadline.



add to my list of 2008 bees the geography bee. i hadn't heard of a geo-bee before, but these kids are amazing with their knowledge of random places, cultures, river systems, etc. this kid didn't miss a question all day. 2008 champion, indeed.