Gymnastics...

It's been a while since I've shot any gymnastics. The local schools haven't had any local meets here and it's been a few years since I've been assigned to shoot practice. So, it was kind of cool to get to shoot a pair of local kids being selected for the Texas team at the national high school meet. So, after spending a few minutes scraping the rust off I got to it.

The nice thing about shooting some of the secondary sports is they are usually so happy to have you there shooting pictures and covering them that they'll give you pretty much free run of things to shoot from wherever is good to shoot from. Having shot a lot of gymnastics in college, I've always enjoyed shooting the sport anyway. The nice thing about practice is you can shoot from the spots you'd never be allowed at during competition. Plus, if you miss something they usually do it 2-3 times. That always helps, especially when it's been a couple years since I've shot the sport. If there was a complaint it was the way the gym is set up there are windows all along the top of the building near the roof causing some really ugly back lighting that crews everything up, so I was only really able to shoot from one side. that and awful lighting in the gym didn't help either. But, crank up my ISO and stay on the right side of thing alleviated that.

Parading Around...

The Western Heritage Parade is one of the biggest parades in Abilene every year. It's also the closest I get to shooting the actual Western Heritage Classic, since it happens every year on the same weekend as the state track meet in Austin. So, the parade usually ends up going to me. That's ok, it gives me the chance to try and figure out a new way to shoot it, fix the mistakes I may have made from shooting it in the past, or make better on a way that I had shot the parade in the past. Shooting the same events year after year can be kind of a double edged sword sometimes. On one had you go in with an idea of how you want to shoot an event. However, the other side of it is trying to find a new or better way to do it than in the past. It helps sometimes when you see a little kid dancing along with the dancing team in the street before the parade starts.

Track Warmup...

The Oliver Jackson twilight meet used to be a pretty big track meet. It used to bring in quite a few good track programs all trying to get their athletes some good times in some of the last meets before nationals. So, there were usually some really good races and event with everyone going all out to make a last attempt to qualify for the national meets. Just a few years ago there used to be full races and prelims in the afternoon, before some really good finals races in the evening. Now, though, some of the races hardly fill half the lanes on the track.

I had to shoot one of the ACU hammer throwers for a feature we were doing about him. Then just a few standalone shots for the next day's newspaper. The good thing about this meet is with so few people there I can shoot from just about anywhere on the track without catching a whole lot of guff about being in folks' ways or bothering anyone else. I also used it as a last-minute warmup for myself before heading to Austin for the state high school meet. So, despite a lack of participants in the meet I ended up getting a few nice images as well as a good warmup for the upcoming weekend.

Over in a High Heeled Dash...

Despite how early the assignment was I was kind of excited about shooting the first-ever high heel dash in Abilene. It was supposed to be a mile and a half race for people wearing high heels with a pretty big prize ($1,000) to the winner. It was raiding money for the Children's Miracle Network and had brought out a pretty big crowd of both men and women. Most of the guys had bought their heels at Goodwill or other thrift stores earlier in the week. Some, however, had gone all out, buying new shoes online or some had their shoes bought for them. It was a pretty funny event and everyone was having a good time, and this was before the event had even started.

No one had told me ahead of time, but they shortened the race from the original length to just .2 miles. It made my assignment go by a lot quicker, but kind of caught me by surprise as the winners were sprinting across the finish line a mere 38 seconds after the start of the race. And all of the 50 or so runners were done in less than two minutes. It was pretty fun to see all the guys out for the event and having fun, and so many of them took it further than wearing just heels. Made for a lot of fun.

Blazing a Trail...

Stories like this I always enjoy shooting. Iria "Bubba" Ephriam was the first black player to play in the Texas state high school basketball tournament, in 1957. I had kind of lucked out when I called him he was out running errands and said he could meet me down the street at one of the parks, perfect, I was really hoping for something other than a shot of him in his home. I grabbed my basketball off my desk on the way out and headed to the park. I was kind of tight on time and was squeezing this in between assignments, but had an idea in my head. I made the shot pretty quick, he was real easy to work with and a lot of fun, a nice guy who had some great stories. I wish I had more time to listen to his stories, he was a really good guy and had a great laugh.

Golf Season Begins...

I've always enjoyed shooting golf. It's not the fastest sport out there and there are a lot of unwritten rules to follow (no shooting on the backswing, don't stand in the golfer's line of sight, etc.), but it's also really satisfying to get a nice frame from shooting golf. Plus on a nice day there are fewer places that are better to be than hanging out on the golf course shooting golf. Notice, I didn't say playing, mainly because I'm an incredibly awful golfer, I'd much rather prefer shooting players golfing... it's much less stressful for me. The one shot that I absolutely love to get are jube shots. It seems like the only time I ever get any real emotions from golfers if when they are upset or reacting negatively. So, when I get a nice shot of someone sinking a long putt with a fist pump and a scream I know I can leave pretty happy. The other thing I love about shooting the game is trying to find something other than the post drive "pose." Of course, I shoot that and probably use it more than I'd like. But, if I get time to work to get something else I'm a lot happier at the end of the round.

Getting Down and Dirty for Justice...

For the kickoff of Abilene Christian University's Justice Week the group organizing the event was having a tug-of-war competition. I'm not quite sure how the two fit together, but hey, I remember being in college and an event like this was sure to draw more people than a speaker of something like that. It was also a Monday, which meant it was a pretty slow day for photos, so I needed to go out and get something for the front page. The event was supposed to start at 5pm, but I guess they didn't realize that anyone would be there to cover the event, or we were given the wrong time by the whoever sent out the press release. Either way it didn't matter, I had to scramble to get photos. I was able to shoot a couple of the competitions and then everyone playing in the mud afterwards, which honestly made better photos anyway. The cleanup turned out to be the best images anyway, with the caked on mud on the participants legs. So, despite getting the wrong time, I was happy with what I had as I left.

Hanging with Legends and Outlaws...

The Outlaws & Legends music festival is probably the biggest music event of the year in the area. It's only been around for a few years and has grown so big they built a new venue for it this year. I ended up covering both days of the event. The first night was just an acoustic jam with a bunch of musicians going around on stage and essentially jamming together. So, I kind of focused all of my attention to the crowd and shooting pretty tight since the crowd wasn't expected to be as good on the first night.

When I went back on Saturday, the crowd, as expected, was pretty huge. The headliner for the event was Merle Haggard, who was going on too late and I wouldn't be able to stick around for. But, there was still a pretty good line up of bands and the huge crowd was having a great time. It also didn't hurt that the weather was almost perfect. The biggest problem of shooting the same event two days in a row is finding something different than the day before, plus the paper was expecting a photo package to go with the event. I stayed there for a couple of different artists to go on and walked around working the crowd as well as shooting the bands on the stage. When Gary P. Nunn took the stage the crowd really got into things and I was able to get some pretty nice shots. IT would've been nice to have a little more time to hang out and see what else I could get later in the night, but I had other assignments to shoot and deadlines.

Water Water Anywhere?

It's a pretty common story here, the dwindling lake levels across the area. We don't get a whole lot of rain to replenish the lakes and the last couple of years haven't been kind, rain-wise. So, a couple of weeks ago I was sent out to do a lake level story. I shot some photos at Lake Fort Phantom Hill in Abilene and then down to Lake Brownwood and Lake O.H. Ivey. I chose these three lakes because Phantom was local and easy to get to, Brownwood is one of the most populated lakes in the area and Ivey is on of the main water sources for Abilene, San Angelo and Midland, it's also the biggest lake in the area.

I had been to Lake Brownwood a couple of years ago and got some really nice photos, the difference, however, was when I went two years ago it was on a weekend in the middle of the summer. This time I was going on a weekday in early March, big difference. Basically I was looking to show how dry the lake was and found some boats sitting on dry land with high weeds around them. Then when I went to Ivey it was obvious how low the lake was, it also kind of showed the story about how deep it was and how much water was still in it. I also was able to show some of the human element at one of the boat ramps and got a few shots of some boaters coming off the lake. The bonus was finding a pack of deer running through one of the parks by the lake.

Hunting for... Airplanes

The DRI annual celebrity quail hunt is a pretty cool event to shoot every year. However, over the last few year the extreme drought we've been having in west Texas has been really bad for the local quail population. So, the organizers have had to come up with some different ideas of things to hunt. Normally on Fridays they do sporting clays and on Saturday afternoon they do some type of trick shooting competitions. This year they were shooting at RC planes. I was kind of nervous going into it since most of the time when I get really excited about something that sounds really cool, it ends up turning out really lame. So I headed out there with guarded optimism about the shoot.

When I got there I spoke briefly with one of the organizers and asked him about the RC planes. He just laughed and said "This is going to be really humbling for some of these guys." I knew right there this might end up being really cool after all. So, the basic idea of this is there is an RC plane with a bunch of pyrotechnic devices on the bottom of it and it flies past a team of about six shooters firing at the little plane zooming by around 60-80mph. When one of the shotgun pellets hits the plane the pyrotechnic goes off and the team scores. It was a lot of fun and the first couple of round almost no one got hits. But then towards the end some of them were really getting into the groove and getting some nice shots in. The planes aren't your typical RC planes, they're basically an engine on plastic board (that ends up looking like Swiss cheese at the end of the shoot). It was a lot of fun to shoot, both for me and the hunters.

Daddy Daughter Date Night...

The Daddy/Daughter Date Night is one of the cool events of the first part of the year. And it's one of those events that can always make for good images if you wait long enough. This year the annual event fell on Valentine's Day, so instead of it running inside on the local front, it was going on 1A. Having a photo on the front page, while it may seem cool, isn't always the best thing. The problem being the photo is going to run in color, when the local front is usually black and white. The great part about b/w photos is when the color is a wreck going the b/w rout saves you a lot of time toning photos.

This night, though, I was able to get a pretty nice shot right off the bat (that never happens). I still ended up spending over an hour there making sure I had what I wanted and just watching the event and making some really nice images of fathers dancing with their girls, and making sure the first shot I got was going to work, which it did. I was kind of torn whether or not to crop it to show just the girl dancing with her dad, but since it was the main photo I decided to keep it the way it was in order to show how big the crowd was. I think people's eyes are still drawn to the great reaction on her face and I was able to leave the event happy.

Playoff Opener...

For the first round of the girls basketball playoffs, Abilene High was playing El Paso Bel Air in the bi-district round. It was the first time in a while that they had made the postseason and the last time they did they lost huge. So, this game was their chance at proving they belonged in the playoffs.

The game started out good, they were in the game the whole first quarter but things started to get away from them in the second quarter. Bel Air ended up getting a pretty big lead and things weren't looking very good for the Lady Eagles. But, in the fourth quarter they started looking really good and after going down by as much as 20, they came storming back and cut the lead to to 10. It looked like they were going to come back. However, once they got it within 10, the Lady Eagles went cold, then their two best players who were in foul trouble and ended up fouling out. After that there was no coming back, but at least it turned out to be an entertaining game.