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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.

Snowblind

The photo coach at my newspaper turned me on to the work of Todd Hido before the holiday season and I spent a few days laying on the couch and going through his work. While it was a mild December here in Iowa City, January has made winter great again and so I’ve had a couple of opportunities to stumble around in the snow and practice trying to integrate flash into my urban landscapes. Still a work in progress, but I’ve been pleased by some of the results.

Field Hockey, the return.

During my time shooting for the Daily Iowan, if you asked me what my favorite sport to shoot is, I'd say women's field hockey. Sure, shooting football and basketball are great—they're the prestige sports and there really is nothing like being on the sidelines or courtside and having the privilege of shooting them. While the sports pages might not teem with field hockey coverage though (er, well, except for the DI) it really has become a favorite of mine to shoot. Why, you ask? 

Well, for starters, the games are short—two 35 minute halves and a 10 minute halftime. Get in, get out. But more than that, it's outside so the light is generally good, it's fairly high action so you can get some fairly dramatic shots and the field isn't that large so you're closer to the action than in something like soccer. 

And Iowa's team, while maybe not great, is pretty good and certainly entertaining. I shot my first field hockey game of the season today and Iowa hung seven on the opposing team. More of that ladies. 

Daily Iowan Slideshow

 

Game Day: vs. University of Northern Illinois

Well, sports fans, another year of college football is upon us and, likely, the last one that I'll be covering in Iowa. To get things started off, I spent the day—a particularly hot and humid one—walking around and documenting tailgating in a Big Ten College town. 

While the photography was okay, something about the day just felt "off." Depending on who you spoke to, it was: the weather, the fact it was a holiday weekend, that the frats/sororities were still in their "dry" period and so there was less partying/general mayhem to document or some combination of all three. People were certainly out and the rain held off but there was a distinct lack of energy throughout the day.

On to the photos: