Cover Story...

The theme of this year's football preview was rivalries. Our sports editor while cleaning out his parents' old house found this electric football game hidden away... and it still worked. Being rather short on time, this thing is a 144-page section had to be shot in little more than a week, we went with the idea of having the coaches of the two rival Abilene city schools playing electric football, since they should be easy to get in the office. Both guys are real easy to work with and the two teams started practice a week later than most of the other area schools since they play Spring football. Well, it turned out that it wasn't so easy to get 2 guys that live only a few miles from the paper to get in. Both had fairly open schedules, but they were both open at opposite times! And, to make it worse I was out running all over west Texas shooting other stuff during the week too.

Well, it finally worked out, we got both of them in on a Saturday. They were great to work with and when they saw the electric football game and were told what we were going to do they both laugh and were really willing to play along. I had spent about 30 minutes setting things up using a couple of our sports guys as stand-ins so I could try a few things out before the coaches came in. It also gave me a photo to show them and tell them exactly how I wanted it to look. The lights showing behind them was something I added in while shooting them. I originally had the idea of the back lighting just to make them pop out a little more from the black background, but after a shot where I didn't have the light in just the right spot I noticed it kind of help make it look like stadium lights as well as making them pop out. So an extra minute and about 5-10 shots later I had the lights in just the right spot and came up with the cover I had. The whole thing with the two of them only took about 20 minutes and that's because they were having a good time and laughing about it. The top photo is the original shot the bottom is how the final cover looked with the words on it, often I shoot these cover photos using a lot of dead space so they can put the words on it, so the originally looks a little more plain. I think It worked out well, I'm happy with the end product.