Courtside tickets? Free! Just one catch: there was work to be done.

Saturday marked my first time at a Stanford basketball game. It also marked my first acquisition of a significant media credential. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

There I was, sitting at the baseline, with a photographer from the San Jose Mercury News at my left and a photographer for the AP at my right, taking photos of the game. In all, there were about seven of us shooting.

Things started off badly for me. My timing was off, and my frustration was leading to AF misses. After a half-hour or so, I got into the groove, and my images showed significant improvement.

Two fun highlights from the game:  First, I got to kick away a basketball as it was flying towards me.  Second, I took three photos during the game that were blown out by the house strobes, which were controlled by the AP photog.  That means that my shutter was open at the exact moment that the strobes were triggered, which is unlikely when you consider my 1/400 second shutter speed.

I haven’t decided exactly which photos I’m going to submit to the paper. I’ve narrowed it down to about seven options, but I’d like to limit my submission to the best four or five. Even then, there are no guarantees that any of them will run.

Even if none of my photos see print, I’m glad I had the opportunity to be at the game: I had fun.

The options are currently on Flickr with the basketball tag.

Today I learned that black hockey tape is an excellent stand-in for gaffer tape.  This is good for at least two reasons:

1. Real gaffer tape is incredibly expensive; black hockey tape is not very expensive
2. I already have a lot of black hockey tape

If you’re unfamiliar with the wonder that is gaffer tape, it’s similar to duct tape but has a cloth backing instead of a vinyl one, and it has an adhesive that will neither leave a residue nor destroy what it has been stuck to.  It’s commonly used in the photo and film industries, hence the name.

There are a number of goals on my long-term to-do list. One of them is to have a photo published.

Well, check that one off!

I had not one, but two photos published in today’s issue of The Stanford Daily. Both were in color, and one took up about 1/4 of the front page! I’m pretty excited.

The two photos:

Online versions of the flood and volleyball articles have also been posted.

I wish I would have rotated the “flood” photo a bit instead of submitting it unedited, but perhaps its off-kilter nature adds some interest.

The thing that surprised me the most was how late the paper was able to change its layout. The normal photo deadline is 9:30 p.m., but the water main didn’t burst until 10:30 p.m., and I wasn’t able to send in the “flood” photo (along with another option) until just before midnight. Granted, I think they were expecting a photo, so they might have been able to proceed with layout with a placeholder, but the flexibility still surprised me.

Hockey is a tough sport to photograph. The white ice wreaks havoc with automatic exposure. The sodium-vapor lights cast weird, ever-shifting hues on the players. The fast action demands high shutter speeds. The list goes on, but no matter: the challenge makes it fun.

I decided to take some photos at the Stanford versus UCLA hockey game this afternoon in Redwood City. The light conditions inside the arena were as poor as expected, so I had to adapt.

First, I went to the open Zamboni door before the game and cleaned off the inside and outside of a section of glass. Since I couldn’t shoot over the glass, my cleaning made the glass as clear as possible to shoot through. I also cleaned a second, similar spot on the other end of the rink. Second, I configured my camera for low-light conditions: f/2.8 at ISO1000 to ISO1600. I wanted to freeze the action, so I went with a shutter speed of 1/320 to 1/400 second. The sodium-vapor lights were awful from a white-balance perspective, so I shot in RAW to ease post-processing.

Composition was always a challenge. The game moved very quickly, so it was necessary to predict where the play would go in order to get decent shots. Getting the correct focus, even with autofocus, was another problem. I eventually used a combination of one-shot, auto-point-selection autofocus with immediate manual tweaks.

I ended up taking almost 600 shots during the game. That might sound like a lot, but a good number of those came in high-speed bursts, so the actual number of “composed” shots was much smaller. Of those, I isolated about two dozen for extra consideration. After careful analysis, two of those made the final cut as action photos:

There were some decent non-action photos; I might post them some day.

What would I do differently? Several things:

• Get better access, perhaps a spot to stand at the end of the bench, so that I wouldn’t need to shoot through glass
• Bring strobes; that would help tremendously with the poor light (even at IS01600 and f/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/400 left the shots almost two stops underexposed)
• Do a closer analysis of acknowledged “great” hockey photos to improve my composition and timing

A little over a week has gone by in my 15-week photo challenge, and I must admit to having had a bit of difficulty in coming up with a theme for the second week. No more: the theme for today through Sunday is “motion.”

The first photo of the week:

As always, you can see the latest photos in my photo challenge Flickr set.