Normally, winters in Charlotte are pretty mild, this year being no exception. It seems that the plants know it too. During my walk, I’m noticing several plants deciding to sprout here at the end of January. Many trees have their springtime buds on and ready to go, though they’ve not blossomed just yet.
This is a nice message of hope and transition. Spring is on the way … at least here in the south! Heck! Daylight Saving’s Time starts in 2 weeks, which seems quite ridiculous, but I’m OK with it. 
© 2013 Graham Glover
Greetings Paul!
Thank you very much for your guide, “Taking Basketball Photos – A Detailed
Guide”. I’m a photography student, working through the NYIP course on
Professional Photography. Also, by day I too am a programmer.Next Friday I will be photographing my first basketball game as a school
assignment. It will be a high school varsity girls game. I did some searching
for what folks say works for photographing basketball. I saw your webpage on it
and then found your guide. It’s nice work and very helpful. Thank you for
creating it!Best regards,
Graham
When I wrote my first draft Taking Baseketball Photos, it was more of a ‘interesting thing to do’. It got lots of hits. Later, after an almost complete rewrite, making it a PDF, and placing it prominently on the web site, it continues to get lots of hits, especially between November and March. This is no surprise, as it is basketball season. At least a couple of times a month, I’ll get e-mails from people who said that they have read the guide, liked it, and are about to use the techniques within. I always ask them to share their photos, but I’ve never heard back … until today.
I received an e-mail from a gentleman named Graham, saying that he had found my guide and that he was going to shoot a basketball game as an assignment. Graham is taking a photography course through The New York Institute of Photography, NYIP – I remember taking this course some 30 years ago! Of course, I asked him to share his results after he photographed the game and, finally, someone did! 
He sent me a link to his Zenfolio gallery with those shots. I asked him permission to share a couple of shots as well as the link to his portfolio of shots and he kindly agreed.
It was a nice group of shots showing lots of key moments captured, most with the ball in frame, save for a couple where that was not the intention. I chose these two because they had elements that I really liked and talked about in my little e-book. The top one, I like the intensity of the shot, the view of the defender’s eye over the shoulder of the opponent. The other photo, to the right, I liked because it contained the shooter, the ball going through the hoop, and the teammate waiting for a rebound, just in case. Add to that the fact there is enough depth of field to see the faces of the crowd. It all works.
Graham, thanks for allowing me to share and for giving me feedback on my book. I appreciate it!
Reflections: I remember when …
Over the years, I have so many photos of Hobbs that I could make a book, and I will. I didn’t intend to document his life, it just sort of happened. However, now in his later years, it seems essential. I’m watching him age, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not so much. He has his good days and bad days. Sometimes he’s full of energy, other times, seems lethargic, dazed, and confused. Today was one of those confusing days for him, or at least I think that it is confusion. Sometimes he’ll just stand in one position, stare, turn around, stare, and complete that loop several times before finally deciding to lie down or perhaps do something else. I know that his vision is not good, but sometimes he has no problems, other times, he’s bumping into things.
There have been a few times when I’ve come home and found him in unusual places, like in the closet. He was probably looking for me, couldn’t find me, ended up in the closet, and couldn’t figure out how to get back out.
I’ve taken to keeping a camera in the living room. In the above picture, he was about to get into his bed; however, he just stopped and stayed right there for about 3 or 4 minutes, doing nothing. Eventually, he got into the bed. Each morning, the sun shines through the window to the left and usually, he’ll get out of his bed to lie in the shaft of sunlight. I guess that the warmth feels good.
I think that, now, in his advanced age, it’s important for me to relish and photograph these different moments. I guess that is how projects are born. We photograph that which matters to us over time.
Last night, some time around 21:15, or so, I was hit by a SPAM storm. This has happened before, but the combination of Akismet and Sparm Karma 2 was generally able to keep it bay; however, last night, I suppose the torrent was too great and it caused my site to exceed my CPU allowance on my host. That said, they deactivated my site. This morning I called Bluehost, my hosting company, and asked what I needed to do to get back into business. They said that I had to install a ‘captcha’ plugin.
I don’t know about you, but I absolutely despise, no abhor, no make that – have a deep, visceral hatred for captcha. I find it very annoying when I run into it. It gets in the way of the commenting flow to have to try to read those crazed, squiggly, warped letters and numbers. So, I made a concerted effort to put into place something that would work, yet wouldn’t be an impediment to posting. I found GASP, which stands for Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin. Totally simple in design and function. It’s a simple checkbox that says: Confirm you are NOT a spammer. I’ve surrounded the box, in the above image, with a red rectangle.You’ll see it right below the comment button. If you forget to check it, you’ll be presented with a dialog box reminding you.
I hated to have to add it, but, SPAM is now a way of life and we need all kinds of ways to combat it.
Warm and cold. Hard and soft. Big and small.
Back on December 28th, I wrote this post about photographic style. In it, I indicated that no one could probably pick out my style in a line up of photographs. Julie, disagreed:
I dunno, there’s a few recurring visual elements that pop up in your work rather often, and this post is an excellent example as your fascination with shadows would be one i’d list! You do tend to lean towards contrast and strong compositions, whether you’re shooting in colour or bw, and you’re good at cropping a scene to tell the story – a style can be the focal length and way you frame things as much as the choice of subject or method of processing.
Julie
Thanks to her astuteness, I went back over some of my earlier work and made a discovery: Not only do I like contrast, as in tonal contrast, I like, even more – to use a big word, juxtapositional contrast. In looking back over these photos, I see a definite pattern of taking photos of soft next to hard, as in this top photo (I’ve lots of flowers next to rocks!), tiny flowers growing at the base of large trees, big sky/small people, warm/cold, lots of sun/shadow – the whole yin/yang of it.
I even went back several years, back to 2006 and had a look, looking for this particular style element and found them all over the place. Believe me, it wasn’t hard. I have no desire, of course, to change this now that I’ve noticed it because, well, I suppose that is just how I see things and that’s alright by me. Of course, I don’t always shoot this way, but a large amount of the time, I do. Not surprisingly, at least to me, when I awoke this morning, I looked out the window, saw frost and sunshine in the backyard, got dressed hurriedly and dashed out the back door, camera in hand. Wow! Frost and sunshine! Gotta have it! LOL – More warm and cold. That’s where today’s photo came from. Hot off the presses.
I’m glad that Julie noticed this. It’s always good to learn something about yourself – something that even you couldn’t see.
Gimme some money, man!
Yesterday, the weather was really warm so I decided to spend an afternoon in Asheville, NC. There’s always something to see there. It’s pretty much a “hippy” town. There are even a couple of head shops there were you can buy all manner of bong, er, I mean tobacco humidifiers. There are also street musicians on quite a few corners. As I was walking, I noticed this guy. He had just finishing setting up and was blowing a few notes, getting ready for his evening. I stopped to take a couple of shots and then kept walking. As I walked away:
Trumpet man: Hey, man! Aren’t you going to pay me for that?
Me: Pay you for what?
Trumpet man: For taking my picture. You should give me a tip or something.
Me: Nope. I’m not going to pay you for your picture. If I come back and listen to you play, I’d be happy to tip.
Trumpet man: C’mon man. Everybody pays me when they take my picture. The least that you could do is buy my CD. It’s got 10 original songs on it!
Me: If I come back by here, I’ll tip you.
Trumpet man: Man! That’s just wrong!
What else could I say. I’d said my piece. I don’t like to try to be guilted into “tipping”, especially just because I have a camera in my hand. Anyway, an hour or so later, I went back by there, fully intending to sit a spell, take a few more photos in the full dark, and give him a tip if I liked his music, but apparently the corner wasn’t working for him; he’d moved on elsewhere. I could appreciate what he was trying to do but he would have gotten more ground with me had he not said anything. I used to tip musicians in Charleston quite frequently, though they never asked. They’d just smile if I pointed the camera their way.
Oh well, que sera, sera! Do you pay on demand if you take photos of street performers?
Fritz and Pedro – Frio River, Leakey, TX 1996 or so
While continuing to dig through the archives, I came upon this negative, taken with my Yashica Mat 124G, back some 16+ years ago. Of course, I have cropped it because I felt that it worked a little better this way rather than square.
I don’t have a lot of photos of my first Miniature Schnauzer, Fritz. I had Fritz for about 11 years (1988-1999) before he got out and ran away. We never did find him. Fritz, like Hobbs was a character. I think that all Schnauzers are; however, he had his own distinct personality and differed greatly from Hobbs in several ways:
1. Fritz was very stubborn. Hobbs is a lot more compliant.
2. Fritz was a runner. If he got out, he was gone and you’d have to chase him. Hobbs is a homebody. He’d gotten out of the backyard before and when we returned home he was sitting on the front porch waiting to get back in.
3. Fritz was very nonchalant about food. Take it or leave it. Put down a bowl of food and he’d eat it when he was hungry. Hobbs would eat until he explodes! He’s always browsing for food.
4. Fritz was grumpy. He would growl if you disturbed his sleep or anything. He would never bite, just “grump”. Hobbs is amenable to most everything. If you wake him, he’ll just roll over and offer his belly.
5. Fritz was pretty much a one person operation. He only liked me, at least until Pedro came along and the two of them got along fabulously. Hobbs knows no strangers at all.
I remember that I had to take him to obedience class and really work with him. He actually got “Most Improved”. He was a real pain in the butt at first, but he learned quickly, but I always, and I mean always, had to assert that I was the boss. Hobbs is like that a little bit, too, but not nearly as much.
Those are just some of the differences. There are many more. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to experience Fritz all the way into old age like I am with Hobbs. It’s good to see some photos of him and remember him for the dog that he was.
