Week 1 in the bag

I shot football for the Rochelle News-Leader last night. It's been about 8 or 9 months since I last shot football and probably longer since I shot night football. (Gotta love playoff Saturday games.) Either way, I wouldn't say it was my worst outing, but it certainly wasn't my best.

The combination of trying to learn to use a monopod and my overall rustiness was a challenge. And even though Rochelle built this really nice new field, they certainly weren't thinking of photographers when they did it. (The inconsiderateness of some people.)

The night didn't start off the greatest. The team they were playing was Chicago Corliss. Apparently they are a slapped together inner city team that hasn't even started classes yet. It actually reminded me of something from one of those Disney movies where the team is terrible and then a coach comes in and whips them into ship only to lead them to the state championship. Except they're still in that really awful part of the movie where the kids can't do anything right. I'm not trying to rag on the kids, they certainly put in a good effort and even scored more points than I would assumed. It just would have been nice if the coaches dressed like actual coaches and their kids wouldn't have taken several cheap shots after the whistle was blown. I can't tell you how many times the refs had to continually remind them to stop when the whistle was blown.

Then there was the huge amount of flags thrown. The first half didn't even end until almost 10 p.m. Oh, and did I mention the other team showed up an hour late. So then we were talking zero daylight shots. Throughout the game I struggled with whether I should be using my flash or not? At times it worked nicely for a little fill and others I was just really mad, like at the photo at the right. A nice reaction shot, but the flash made it look terrible.

I have another game tonight on the southside of Chicago. I might try no flash the first half and flash the second half and tweek my settings a bit. It'd be really nice if I had some 300 glass, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Rochelle came out ahead 49-14 in the end, but they definitely need to tighten up. Hopefully week 1 jitters are gone by the 2nd or third week because any team with a reasonable amount of talent will certainly give them a challenge.

Anyway, I have a lot of photos to post, but it's going to take a little time to get them up. I'll go into detail about shooting on my other blog later today or tomorrow, but for now I gotta get ready to go.