Last Friday I went to the River Cats home opening game.  I’ve never been to a River Cats game, never been to Raley Field.  Haven’t even seen a ballgame since maybe high school.  Maybe.  Gotta say though, it was a good game.  The Cats ended up winning 8-4, and all was right.

I couldn’t get to my seat without squeezing myself through a pretty crazily packed row, so I just didn’t.  Stood at the edge of the concourse for most of the game, the ol’ 70-210mm f/4 strapped on, on my el-cheapo Walmart monopod on my Induro ball head.  I could’ve done much better with something out to 300mm, but hey, it’s better than nothing.

Either way, I had a good time, got some alright shots, and realized that I need an IS lens if I’m shooting that far extended even on a monopod hehe.

Maybe I’ll put more from the game up later, but it’s late.  I just needed to get something up tonight, it’d been nearly a week.

Back on October 24th, I shot a football game for one of the supervisors at work.  Her daughter, Jenna, is on the yearbook team for Rio Americano High School here in Sacramento, and so I agreed to shoot the games for her yearbook work after she saw the shoot for my supervisor’s son’s soccer game.  Now, I’ve never quite fashioned myself a sports photographer, but oddly enough, that’s the two most recent jobs I’ve been approached with.  I’ll definitely say it’s fun and exciting, but I’m definitely feeling the need for some better gear on these jobs, and it’s extremely challenging.

Although I did have a lot of fun at this game.  Again, first time shooting a football game, and definitely had a good learning experience.  Yet again very glad I picked up that monopod before the soccer game shoot–two events and it’s already proven itself immensely useful.

I’ll probably be posting more from these games as the next few weeks go on, just in an attempt to get back into a schedule of posting.  I have another shoot or two to edit and post as well, so we’ll see what happens.

This particular shot is from the Junior Varsity team, with this player diving into the corner of the endzone for a touchdown.  I luckily had the foresight for whatever reason to run over to the end of the field on a hunch, and got a good shot or three.

View the slideshow for The Plan – The Slammers

Update - Interested in buying a print? Photos from this set are now available for sale, with a ton of printing/framing options!!  I’ve never put any prints up for sale before, so this should be interesting.

This Saturday I did my first shoot for The Plan.  My boss invited me out to shoot his son’s soccer game, get some cool pics for him and family etc.  It was pretty fun, albeit hot outside, but fun.

I’ve never shot any sort of sports before, so it was a learning experience (as well as a reason to finally buy the monopod I’ve been wanting to try out hehe).  The closest to sports I’ve shot is concerts.  Which actually the two are pretty similar, with the exception of a much smaller level of predictability with sports of course.

So after an hour of shooting, and several hours of culling and editing, I’ve got a group of shots that I think work out pretty well.  Ended up trying some new tricks in Lightroom 2 and Photoshop CS4 here and there, and am starting to get a really decent workflow down.  The only downside is I did end up underexposing the shoot by a small bit, but luckily there was still usable data in the shadows.  That being said, I hate metering for broad daylight hehe.