State Golf Day 2,

The second day of state golf was a lot more of the same that I had shot in the first day. I did try to change things up a little bit in trying to focus on the one local kid and the players who had done well the previous day. I was thinking being able to spend a little more time with them would allow my shots to be a little better. There were a couple of shot I did like. I was able to pull out my wide lens and shoot a few different things. While shooting over at the Class 1A tournament I ended up pulling out my iPhone to shoot a couple shot of the players teeing off. I did this since the camera on the phone doesn't make and shutter noise while allowed me to shoot during the player's backswing, which is normally a huge no-no. But, since it made no sound I was able to shoot it and the player never knew. I'm glad I tried to make a few practice frames since the shutter lag of the iPhone camera is quite a bit more than my Nikons.

State Golf, Day 1...

Going into the week, I was thinking that shooting state golf this year was going to be a lot easier than the past since I didn't have to split thing with tennis. Damn, was I wrong. This may have been the toughest time I've had shooting golf in a long time, mostly just because of the sheer number of golfers we had in the tournaments. Normally in the past we'd have a couple of teams competing and I could spend time shooting the better teams and then grab a few shots of the others.

This year, though, we had six teams competing in three classes and in Class A there were two boys and girls teams. Not to mention a bunch of individual players. To break this down: I had to shoot on three different courses, and when the girls start of the back nine, the boys start on the front. Basically, I was spending a whole lot more time walking the golf course (since in my 10 years of doing this, I'm yet to find the rumored media cart that is allegedly out there) carrying all my camera gear around with me. When it's just a couple of teams I can spend a few holes watching players, seeing how things develop. This time though, I was shooting a player for a hole and plotting where or who I'd be shooting next at the same time, it really kind of sucked.

The other problem I ended up running in to was most of our teams and players were all having bad rounds at the same time. It was rather uncharacteristic of what I was used to shooting in the past. The only good thing coming out of all of this was that golfers playing bad usually translates into sand shots or nice facial expressions. So, even given all of the time constraints, I managed to pull off a few decent shots, though it was mostly of players not pulling them off.

On a Foggy, Rainy Night...

If you live in Texas you can probably skip this paragraph... Rain is rare here, and on football weekends I sometimes wonder if Texans and God have a deal that in return for this awful drought, the few time it will actually rain will not be on Friday nights. It's been at least four years since I've shot Friday night football in the rain (there was one game two years ago that go cancelled because of lightning, but I never actually got rained on.

So, when I saw the forecast of 80% chance of rain on Friday night, I was hoping for the 20% to happen at least for a couple hours until the game ended, after that... by all means, please, rain cats and dogs! I didn't get my wish, but at least it didn't rain that hard during the game. I was shooting Cisco playing Holliday in Springtown. On paper, this game was going to be as tough as last week when Cisco upset the defending state champs from Idalou. Obviously, last week, paper was wrong. This week though, it was spot on.

Holliday came out pretty aggressive trying to set the tone of the game. Going for it on fourth down and failing on their first drive. Then Cisco took over and pounded the ball down their throat and a long touchdown run for the first touchdown. That was as close as things got the whole game. Cisco owned this game and showed no signs of a hangover from their big win the week before. Holliday was clearly overmatched and Cisco played the game strictly business. And the rain, luckily, never came down really hard, just kind of drizzling the whole game, plus it was really foggy, which actually worked things out really well, giving me this surreal looking light, coupled with really good stadium lights, that made for a few decent photos, plus the long runs made it easier to read Cisco's option attack that I had so many problems with the week before.