I was sitting in the dugout before the start of a local high school tournament game Tuesday evening… just going over some assignment notes and collecting my thoughts before game time. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what was going on around me until I noticed this young man in the dugout with me. For some reason, he caught my attention. He was probably the son of a coach, or maybe a little brother of one of the team members. He was dressed out in his baseball uniform just like the rest of the team. I grabbed my camera and snapped this photo of him standing behind the dugout fence watching the team warm up on the field. Then I started thinking…

This kid is the reason professional baseball exists. He’s the fan. He’s gonna play little league baseball while he’s watching his favorite pros on TV. He’s also gonna buy replica jerseys with Pujols or Jeter written on the back one day… He doesn’t know what a salary cap is… or Rule 5… or Tommy John surgery… or about owners and middle management. What he does know is who autographed his baseball cards… who shook his hand…

Who knows…

It was just intriguing to watch him and then write my own story about what may be going through his mind…

High school baseball season is rolling, and it’s renewing my hunger for the minor league season that starts up during the first week of April. I was in the dugout at a local high school game this evening and decided to look around for some type of photo opportunity that speaks of the season opening. This bag of weathered baseballs partially open with a few faces shining through seemed like a good image to go along with the idea.

This image also shows bias from the photographer ;)

This is another installment in the “Art of the Game” series.  I’m still out here searching for out-of-the-ordinary images from sporting events.  I was sent out to shoot a feature on a local swimmer this afternoon, and I wanted to add something else to this series, because I don’t shoot swimming very often.  Almost every time I shoot swimming for action, I’m looking for the standard photos where I can see a face, such as the head-on butterfly stroke or a side view of the breast stroke.  This particular image was when the swimmer was just about to emerge from underwater on a backstroke run. 

I’m starting to enjoy this series quite a bit if I can keep it going.  I would like to round out the collection with at least 25 images over the course of this calendar year.  I’m currently in basketball and wrestling season, but I haven’t spotted a wrestling scene yet that inspired an image for this series.  I’m probably going to be shooting wrestling again this coming Friday, so I may look a little harder for something from that sport that can find its way into this collection…

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I don’t get to cover swimming events too often, so I wanted to try to find something to add to my “Art of the Game” series at last night’s event.  I was watching the swimmers on the starting blocks and decided to try that approach for something artistic in the sporting event for this series.  I’ll be back in the basketball gym tonight and I will be looking for something else there as well. 

I had a wrestling event on Wednesday and didn’t see anything of particular interest.  I’ll have more opportunities at that sport before winter’s end though…

I usually find myself searching for interesting project ideas this time of year.  We’re about to roll the calendar year and it’s always fun to think about a new photography series to work on over the course of the new year. 

I have been struggling artistically over the last few years, and I think it’s primarily because of the amount of sports photography I’m doing.  Great sports photography is an art of its own, but after a while, all the images start to feel the same to me.  During the 2007 year, I found myself wondering how I could integrate my interest in artistic photography with sports.  When I’m looking around a sports venue, I have a difficult time spotting the potential artistic images in the scene.  Since I’m spending so much time photographing sports, I have decided to create the “Art of the Game” project for the 2008 year.  Maybe I can train my eye to see something other than sports action over the course of the coming year.  Hopefully I’ll create a nice portfolio of artistic images in the process…

I hope everyone had a good holiday season and Happy New Year :)