Photography Tips — By Tommy Purser
Another busy time of the year is upon me as spring sports time has arrived. Check out Page 8 to take a look at the schedule ahead of me.
Needless to say, I won’t make it to all those games but I’ll go to a lot of them and take note of how our youngsters perform in all those endeavors.
I’ve had a number of amateur photographers helping me out lately, taking photos of various events and sending some of them to me for publication, or at least for my perusal. I can’t get them all in the Ledger, but I’ve used a lot and look forward to viewing their artistry in the months to come. Their efforts have been outstanding.
Last night, at the Jeff Davis High basketball game, I gave two of those photographers a tip based on my 50-plus years of photography work. I offered my opinion that to get the best angle for sports photography, you need to get down low — squat, kneel or sit —to get the best angle. If anyone should doubt that piece of advice, watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl game and take a look at the professional photographers along the sidelines. You’ll find that, they too, subscribe to my angle theory. Not only will they squat, kneel and sit, some of them will lay down to get their cameras as low as they can.
I explained to my young photography friends that I’ve been squating, kneeling and sitting for more than half a century. Today, I can still get down low for my photographs — but getting up again is a lesson in futility.
With that, I got on the sidelines under the basket where our team was shooting, squatted down, and took a few photographs. Then, I tried to get up.
Alas, my young friends missed the opportunity to get the best photograph of the night — a shot of a 75-year-old man trying to get up from his squatting position.
As I told one of them a few months back, the best photographs at a sporting event are often those taken away from the playing field — on the sidelines, in the stands, any number of places that give readers a view of things happening away from the action.
Yes, a photograph of my struggling to get to my feet would have been, indeed, an award winner.
Maybe next time.
