Cover Stories...

I'm beginning to believe the worst part of football season happens before the season even starts. It certainly seems like it may be the busiest. It has a lot more to do with the deadlines that seem to get tighter every year and not with the grind of shooting the photos... that's always the fun part. The biggest problem is the logistics and trying to make my schedule end up fitting in with kids' and coaches schedules.

Luckily, we have a lot of really good coaches in the area who make life a lot easier in getting their players back after practice in order to let me shoot the photos. Now, it wouldn't be so bad if this was all I had to do, however, for the first four days of this I'm shooting mug shots of all our area 11-man schools. Some of the cover shots work out when I'm able to get them shot after shooting mugs. However, most of them require some creative scheduling, like driving 60 miles out of my way after finishing mugs, or waiting around for a practice to finish, of hoping a kid can come back a couple hours after practice is over. But, luckily they all worked out, and for the most part I was happy with the results.

For the front cover of the tab (above), the theme was about quarterbacks so we took the best of the local quarterbacks (Cooper's Clayton Nicholas) and the best area QB (Snyder's Keenon Ward) and put them on the cover. The problem was there was no way we'd be able to get them both in the same town because of practice schedules. So, the only option was to shoot them separately and put them together in a photo illustration. Now, this would have been easy enough, I've done similar photos, however, it's always a good idea, when you walk out of the office with the lighting kit to MAKE SURE ALL THE PARTS ARE IN IT!! Like the reflectors!! Because it truly sucks to be setting up the lights and notice you have no reflectors and knowing there no way I'm going to have time to come back to re-shoot it in time. So, after a slight panic attack, I pulled out the strobes I always keep in my car and set them up on the light stands, the strobist approach worked out well this time. Note to self: don't start one of the busiest weeks of the year right after coming off vacation!

Football Covers...

So, a couple of weeks ago I was looking through the previous year's football tab trying to get an idea of what I shot, hoping for some inspiration for this year's covers. What I saw was a real disappointment in what I had shot last year. Most of the covers I had shot were action shots, they were ok, but I didn't really like the overall product that I had done. I know some of that had to do with time constraints, a lot more last year than I had this year. Others were just not real great in the way of ideas that were given, and some of the stories weren't real conducive to producing a good cover. Basically, it boiled down to me being really disappointed in the work that I had done, and I was determined to improve it this year to a product I was happy with.

Over the past few years, in addition to a front cover of the section, we've split up all of the classifications (Class 1A-5A, six-man and college, seven total) with their own individual covers as well. It's a neat idea in theory, and a helluva lot of work in the short period of time that I get to do it in. Basically, I get about a week-and-a-half (eight total days) to get all of these done, in addition to the first four days of practice being taken up by shooting mug shots.

This year, I think it helped that all the cover stories were player features. This allowed me to go out and shoot portraits of the players. Most of them I was able to shoot portraits for, I did use an action shot of one using game file art for one of the covers, just to change it up a little, plus the photo worked really well as a cover shot.

For the overall cover (second from the top), Abilene High was the defending state champs, so they were a natural fit for the cover. I'd originally planned to put them in a dark room and have a black background, but as I was walking into the coaches office I walked by the wall with all the team accomplishments over the year and figured that would make a better background, all that was left after that was putting the players in and setting up the lights. It worked out just right so you could see what was in the background but not be too distracting.

The only other problem I had was trying to avoid making all the photos look the same while maintaining the same style and still leaving some space to put text on the photo for the cover feel while at the same time being stuck having to put it in a 10x10 hole (which was the page dimensions). I think it worked out ok. I was happy with the overall product, of course there were some photos I liked better than others, but that's going to happen any time. But, compared to last year, the sum of the covers were considerably better.

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.