Was laying in bed sick as a dog when my buddy Mike Isler sent me a link to a professional wakeboarding competition going on at Firebird Lake about 15 miles from my house. It had been a good 5 days since I had last shot so I was antsy to get back to work!
I sent an email about the shoot to my ESPN the Mag editor to pitch the idea to her. I was somewhat expecting her to decline the idea but I was delighted to get an email back a few hours later giving it the go ahead.
Immediately after shooting the day baseball game in Arlington I headed to the airport (after a stop at a Dallas area Chilis) Was supposed to fly out at 8pm but of course my flight ended up delayed till 1030pm. Killed a few hours at the Chilis in the airport terminal before finally boarding the commuter jet for my flight to Kansas City. After the long line at the rental car counter I finally ended up at my hotel room at 1am. Ok no big deal right. Well did I mention the 3.5 hour drive to the track in Iowa at 8am?
After a long and tiring day at the US Open in San Diego I flew home for a few hours of sleep and woke up early the next morning to go shoot a 3 game series between the Atlanta Braves and the Texas Rangers at the gorgeous Arlington Ballpark. I haven’t gotten much stock on Chipper Jones or Josh Hamilton the past few years so I needed some images of them for my archive so shooting this series was a no brainer. Not only was the stadium gorgeous but it had really nice light along with good shooting spots. I didn’t get any spectacular images but I left the state with a ton of good stock that will certainly pay off in the near future and on down the road. Plus I got my fix of sweet tea at all the restaurants and fast food joints I hit up during the trip. Next stop Iowa!
So I was sitting in the Las Vegas airport after three days of shooting the Olympic Trials for wrestling and judo. I am not really a golf fan or anything but with a tournament the size of the US Open plus a few of my buddies (Benson and Vasquez) were there shooting it I passively followed the action when I had a few minutes.
My flight ended up being delayed by about 45 minutes which had me sitting on the ground in the corner plugged into a power outlet working on images when my buddy Pouya Dianat IM’d me to tell me about the final hole of the tournament with Tiger Woods trailing Rocco Mediate by a stroke. I didn’t think he was gonna sink the final put to send the game into overtime then I heard cheers from all around the airport and seconds later received the IM from Pouya “WOW”
I’m not really much of a wrestling fan nor do I really know anything about the sport. But I do gotta admit you can pull some interesting pics from these type of events. Spent some time the first day shooting down low on the mat but the backgrounds were garbage so I decided to go up higher to clean up the shots. It definitely was a cleaner shot up high but you lost the perspective of how high the wrestlers were when they were being thrown through the air. The referees were a problem as they constantly were moving around and blocked several potential good shots. To combat that I put a remote camera up directly across from my shooting location to ensure I would have a clean shot of any big moments in the fight that may arise. In the final rounds the winners in each category would win a slot in the Beijing Olympics so the emotion displayed by a lot of the winners was fantastic. All in all it wasn’t too bad of a weekend.
