Shooting state basketball is a lot like being a short order cook — you’ve got to take your ingredients (teams, players, cameras, lenses, angles, basketballs) and make a bunch of photos to fulfill a wide range of content needs and you’ve got to do it fast. With the web, we’ve got the opportunity to show more images to our readers than ever before. And with that opportunity comes a new set of factors to juggle. Here’s a list of what I might be given to make pictures for at any given game:
One photo immediately after the event (within 15 minutes, like an appetizer) to use on the TourneyTown site on the game summary story that goes up as soon as the game ends.
2-4 photos for print.
10+ photos to be used on the sports blog and TourneyTown.
1-2 feature photos for the print photo page that will run Sunday after the tournament. This can be fans or non-action moments.
1-3 photos for other papers. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll have some help from other papers covering the tournaments in Spokane and Tacoma. In return, if we’re shooting a game of a local team against one of their local teams, I’ll get some action shots of the other team to send to other papers if they’ve called to request photos.
So, to get all this cookin’ this is how I’ve ended up shooting most of my games. I’ll shoot the first half of the game from a couple different angles. If I need photos for another paper, I’ll shoot those photos then, so I can focus exclusively on the home team near the end of the game. I’ll dump those photos into the computer during half-time and do an edit during the third quarter. If I have time, I’ll pull out and caption and tone the photo I’ll send first to TourneyTown.com. If I need a feature or want to try a different and more risky angle, I’ll shoot this in the third quarter. Sometimes I’ll shoot from my spot at my computer, making pictures when the team is on my side of the court, toning and saving images when they are on the far side of the court.
Lastly, I’ll shoot the final quarter, which usually has a lot of emotion and the reaction of the local team, whether they’ve won or lost. I’ll quickly put these into the computer and add that edit to the half-time edit. These are all saved to a folder that I can work out of. TourneyTown.com gets its first photo, if I didn’t get it done during the third quarter. I’ll figure out which four photos I’m going to send to print and caption and tone these. The rest of the photos get a generic caption. Once every photo has a caption and has been toned, I’ll copy and save a set of these photos for both TourneyTown.com, then the sports blog. I’ll send those off. Then I’ll finish toning my print photos and send those off. Imagine plates of delicious food being set up under the heat lamp and being whisked away for ever-voracious diners.
Lastly, I’ll work on any feature photos or send off any photos to other papers. By this time, the buzzer is starting the next game or I’m already into the first couple minutes of the first quarter and grabbing my cameras and getting back to the floor for the next round!
