Where’d September go? All I remember is sitting in traffic.
And football. Always football. My college team has continued to limp along since being crushed a few weeks ago in the second week of the season. They coasted to an easy win against Samford in week three, won in double-overtime vs. Hostra two weeks ago, and were in the process of destroying a vastly-outmanned Gardner-Webb squad last weekend before most of the starters left the game in the second quarter. The game ended up with Furman on top, 48-31 and featured something like 1,000 yards total offense (both teams).
Our defense continues to be suspect, and the game next week – against a very good Appalachian State team – will probably answer a lot of questions about Furman’s chances to live up to their pre-season #1 rankings.
The worst part about a blow-out win like last weekend’s is that it’s tough for me to take the right pictures. The radio crew at the games selects three “Players-of-the-Game” – offense, defense, and special teams. As part of my sponsorship deal, I’m supposed to provide them with a decent photo of each of those players, which is enlarged to a life-sized portrait to be used on banners which hang in the athletic offices.
Must admit that it’s a serious ego stroke to walk down the hall there and see a string of banners made with my pictures stretching back over the last couple of years, but this is the first year that I’ve actually been contractually obligated to get those pictures. Because the players of the game aren’t chosen by the crew until very late in the game – sometimes after the game is over – I’ve usually just got to hope that the chosen players have been on the field and visible enough so that I manage to catch their images during the course of shooting the game. In a game like last weekend’s, that becomes a tall order because there are so many different faces on the field. I got lucky in one respect because I was informed late in the fourth quarter that the special team player was going to be the long-snapper (the guy who snaps the ball for punts, field goal attempts, and point-after-touchdown attempts. About thirty seconds after I learned that, Furman scored and I was able to shoot the long-snapper on the PAT. If I hadn’t been told in advance, there’s no way I would’ve taken the kid’s picture.
I also managed to snag a couple of useable shots of the offensive player, but it appears that I completely dropped the ball on the defensive player – so I’ll be digging through the photos from the last two home games today to see if I can find one of this kid – isolated enough so that nobody will know that it wasn’t from this game. Not a huge deal, but when you consider that I take 600-700 pictures per game, it becomes a time-consuming task.
I handed a couple of my cameras off to “assistants” this past weekend. It’s interesting to see what other people manage to shoot, but it also gave me about 300 extra pictures to wade through. I was trying to put up a slideshow yesterday, and really sort of lost interest after about an hour of staring at photos. One guy spent a lot of time photographing his friends, his daughters, the crowd, people on the sideline…I did manage to use a couple of his shots, but it was basically a yawn-fest. Sort of like watching your neighbor’s home movies.
I managed to get a few decent shots, too. The second-string quarterback made my day with this shot.
My favorite shot this year (actually, my favorite shot of all time) 
was taken last week, however. It happened after the game when a guy I know from my website let his kid try to kick an extra point. I got down on my stomach directly in front of the kid and snapped the following – and nearly wet myself when I saw what I’d gotten. This is the type of shot that makes the whole idea of sports shooting appealing. You can’t really see how good this is at this size, but it’s going to make a great poster for me.
Listening to the internet broadcast of the last game at the moment – I’m on the radio! Woohoo! Man I’m a geek. In my defense, I was taken by surprise. I was wandering around in the endzone and I yelled over to the sideline reporter to ask him if the radio guys had picked their players yet. He told me no and then shoved a microphone in my face and started asking me questions about the players of the game that are selected by my website (I award “The Unofficial Player of the Game” each week).
Went skating with a friend late last week and managed to completely wear him out. It was kind of cool because he’s a big hiker-type guy and I figured I’d be vomitting by the time we’d finished. It worked out the other way – he was heaving after about 10 miles and had to quit. I continued on for another 10 miles or so.
Had to rotate the wheels on my skates a few weeks ago – I’d completely worn away the inside edge on the leading wheels. I’ve been paranoid ever since that my wheels are going to fall off when I’m tearing down a hill or something. Hasn’t happened yet. Knock on wood.
Well, I’ve completely wasted a morning between checking emails and looking at backups from the weekend (yeah – I actually am getting some work done). Hope everyone has a fun week and doesn’t get hit by a hurricane or anything.