So, I have always struggled with photographing baseball. I never played sports as a kid, so my understanding of every sporting event is what I’ve learned by making pictures. And while I’ve started to learn enough about football, basketball and soccer to be able to start to be able to predict peak action (and therefore get photos I like), I still am hit and miss (pun intended) when it comes to shooting baseball. So here’s the system I’ve developed. Get my safety shots first. I ALWAYS shoot the pitchers of both teams. I may not know much about baseball, but I do know that the pitcher is a pretty key player. Plus, they do the same thing, over and over and over and over. And they do it in the same spot.

Once I’ve got that. I swing my lens on over to first and wait for someone to dive back. Since this also happens fairly regularly, I can stay focused on the base and usually get a decent shot.

The final thing I look for as a basic story-telling image is a happy reaction shot, the team high-fiving someone who’s scored. Again, even if there’s action at the plate that I somehow miss, I can usually get my lens around to the team, who are standing and waiting for the action to come to them.

After these three shots, anything different, for me, is a definite score. You never know, after several games of striking out photographically, I do occasionally get a home run.

State basketball is always a blast. And busy. It is an alternate universe that we step into for a few days each year — once at the dome, the day becomes a blur of shooting photos, processing photos, and sending them to the web and back to the office for print. It’s an experience that has its own rhythm — shoot, download, tone photos while shooting the end of a game, stretch, upload photos, shoot the crowd, download photos, head up to the press room for a soda, shoot, talk to photo friends from across the state who have come into town to work, process photos, stretch, shoot, rock out to a school band, shoot shoot shoot. Here’s a taste of my day:

View along the media table  – our camp for the tournament.

…waiting for photos to download…

Leg stretch during a timeout!

Bliss. Coffee, quiet, and red vines in the media room. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

It’s a problem we often have when shooting high school sports. Cross country runners don’t wear numbers during meets (except in the bigger meets) Ditto for high school track athletes. This time of year our biggest problem is high school soccer. Many of the teams we cover don’t have numbers on the fronts of their jerseys.

I shot this photo at a recent soccer match.

West Valley High School's Forrrest Chapin, left and Sunnyside High School's Alfredo Gomez battle for the ball in the second half of their game May 15, 2010. West Valley won 2-0.

No numbers. How to identify the players?

One solution is to shoot the backs of the players, where there are numbers.

West Valley High School beats Sunnyside High School 2-0 in the regional soccer championship May 15, 2010.

Sometimes, though, the players don’t turn around soon enough for us to photograph the backs of their jerseys.

Then, we must look for other identifying marks on players. In the first photo above, the player in red has white athletic on his left hand. We can look for that tape in another frame, hopefully a frame in which we can see the jersey number of the player.

Shoes are also good way of identifying individuals since most players wear different shoes with different markings.

If all else fails, we can take a copy of the photo to a coach or other player later in the day (or e-mail it to them) to get help identifying players. But the photo has to be really, really good to merit this amount of effort and often there’s not time to do this.

Trying to sort out players’ identities can be time consuming and frustrating (especially with a looming deadline) but it’s part of the job. We sometimes joke about each of us on the photo staff chipping in money to buy numbers for the fronts of jerseys.

But until that that happens we will continue to photograph back of jerseys and look for tape and different shoes.

–Gordon King

Last week, I discovered yet another reason I’m a photographer: because I’m not cut out to be a ball player.

I’m starting on a story about the players of the Yakima Bears and the life of a minor-league ball player. During the team’s second practice, the hitting coach was warming up his players and evaluating their hitting skills by having them hit ground balls. When everyone had had a turn he pointed to me and told me I was up. I set my gear down and picked up a bat.

Sad to say, I hit one of maybe six tries. Enlightening, yes. A surprise? Nope. Just another confirmation that my hand-eye coordination is best used in the service of photography! And gave me even more appreciation of the skills of the young men I’ll be documenting this summer as they play baseball and reach for the major leagues.

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!