
While sitting in my hotel room in San Francisco as I prepared to shoot NASCAR the next morning I was informed that Manny Ramirez would be making his first baseball start, in a AAA minor league game in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since being handed a 50 game suspension by MLB for steroids. It was Saturday night and the game was on Tuesday three days later which gave me little time to put together a trip for a game I figured would be worth covering.
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Just over a week ago I awoke to the bombshell news that Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Manny Ramirez had been suspended 50 games for testing positive for a performance enhancing drug. With this potentially being the biggest sports breaking news event of the year I quickly got out of bed and began going through a harddrive containing my 2009 archive of images from Spring Training as well as a few regular season games to ensure I had all my best stuff edited, captioned and online for editors to purchase.
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As a photographer who works between 50-60 hours a week one thing that gets tough is taking the extra time to try unique shots. Sure sometimes it can produce something wonderful that makes it worth the extra time and effort but more often than not it doesn’t work as planned and leaves you pissed off for taking all the extra time instead of just doing the normal thing everyone else does. But in these economic times with photographers being laid off and freelance budgets drying up it is imperative to be different from the norm to survive as a photographer. Continue reading to see how hard work can sometimes pay off!
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