Two firsts yesterday. Shot my first prep sports and shot my first assignment with my new Canon 1DX MK II. As for the camera, I’d shot one before while working at The Daily Iowan and thought about buying one for quite some time but had avoided doing so—due entirely to cost, of course. But now that I’m freelancing I was forced to realize that my 7D MK II just. wasn’t. good enough. And so I upgraded. And, based on a sample size of one, it was worth every penny. Sure, I still missed shots, but at least **I** was missing them and not my camera—and even then, I didn’t miss many.

As for the games, it was playoff soccer so the teams were good and the games were high scoring. But I still haven’t cracked the code of how cover a team that’s losing. Fortunately, my assignment was to cover both teams in each game (all of the teams come from the readership area of the paper) so I could focus more on the winning side but making a meaningful image of a team that’s just doing nothing continues to elude me.

Storm Ambushing

Well, you can’t really call it ‘storm chasing’ when it comes right to you. So, it happens that we had a tornado rip through Iowa City yesterday. Doesn’t seem to have done too much damage - touched down to the southeast of the city and leveled a cattle barn, but that was about all I saw. Far more interesting were getting shots of the funnel cloud spikes as it passed by my apartment building.

Don’t think I’ll be taking up storm chasing any time soon but shooting this gave me a great appreciation for what those folks do. This was thrilling but even watching these (small?) spikes form, you could tell just how dangerous this all is.