Relaxing summers?

Olympic years are great in helping to fill the summer void, especially when you have a local tie. Our area is a hub for Olympic weightlifting, and one of the members of the U.S. women's soccer team grew up an hour down the road.

 

About this topic ...

This iPhone-only professional photographer is the future of sports photography

 

I've met Brad and talked with him on a couple of occasions. Most recently last year, where we talked a length about his book of pictures during the course of a baseball season taken with nothing but an iPhone. He'll be the first to tell you it's impossible to get a sports action image anywhere near professional quality with smartphones. The kind of images in that article and in his book -- portraits, candids, some abstract and landscape/wide angle shots of ballparks and celebrations -- are nothing Mom and Pop want of their kid's team. They want action pics of their kid.

 

I spent all of my newspaper career in the same market, a small Southern city with a D-1 school, a really-good NAIA program, two highly competitive junior colleges and 20 high schools of every size, shape and form. So we always had plenty to write about in the summer. Features from the university, summer workout stories (primarily football and basketball), camp stories from the preps and jucos were staples. Over the years, other ideas on filling summer space with local content came and went, from heavy on youth baseball (you've never experienced true sports writer's hell until you've typed in mountains of youth baseball linescores) to golf and tennis to going big on outdoors and recreation. We also went heavy on the Braves, and anything on the wire about the state colleges or the Saints were considered within the realm of "local interest."

We got some help a few years ago when a group of golf enthusiasts put together a really top-notch amateur golf tournament at one of the many golf courses in the area. This wasn't just a local-yokels four-ball tournament, this event drew many of the better college golfers from all over the Southeast, as well as some from other parts of the country, and they even had a few overseas players who were passing through. That was a godsend. We played it up, a week's worth of good meaty game stories, sidebars and columns in early July, usually the deadest week of the year. It became one of my favorite events of the year to cover.

And, frankly, the last couple of years, we really didn't have much "summer break." We'd start planning our football preview in mid-June, not long after I finished the All-Area Baseball Team, and we hit the grindstone on that right after the Fourth of July. We had to do it that early because it went off to be printed around Aug. 1 . So we really didn't have any time or reason to sit around in idle during the summer.

 

The key word there is "professional."
Brad Mangin obviously knows what he's doing. He knows what a good shot is and the right angle to take it from. As the piece said, he also knows what he can and can't do with his equipment, which is a crucial piece of knowledge to have.
Parents (and even some of our own staffers) shooting a softball game from outside the fence, and giving us a grainy, blurry photo of a left-handed batter taken from 75 feet up the first base line have none of that knowledge.

 

We're in that same boat for our football preview. The high school programs are all busy in June with 7-on-7 stuff, workouts and camps, so it's a good time to catch everyone in "football mode." Then they shut it down for a few weeks in July to give everyone a break before real practice starts. So we basically have about three weeks here to get all of our heavy lifting done before everyone scatters to the wind.

The other high school programs do a lot of work in June, too. The games themselves aren't worth covering in depth -- they don't even keep score most of the time -- but they make for good photos and a few update stories. July is a lot harder to get through than June.

 

Definitely. Any story would have to address the notion of expectations. (My expert did that nicely. She talked realistically about the kinds of acceptable shots you can get with a smartphone vs. what you'll get with fancy equipment. She didn't get too technical ... kept it very pedestrian, very consumer-friendly.)

For a smaller, community-oriented paper that solicits photos from readers, it's important to talk about what you need in an image for publication.

 

This is getting the wheels turning in my brain. Might make for good column fodder.

 

You can take excellent feature photos with an iPhone. I've gotten to the point where I'll take my own photos because I know what I want. For action, though, forget it. Not enough zoom, shutter speed or resolution.

 

Yeah, I wasn't really suggesting turning your iPhone into an action camera. But you can get decent featur-ish shots if you know what you're doing. I've never really messed with a photo editor on the phone, though. Still do that on the laptop.

 

Summer is a pitfall and it was the time of the year I hated the most as an SE. But really, it only lasted a few weeks because there was always leftover stuff and all-county teams in June and in August, we were already working on football tab stuff.

Don't be like my second shop, where we covered Dixie Baseball like it was the Super Bowl from when preps ended in May to the start of football season. I actually worked harder during that time than during football and basketball because of the endless tournaments. Readers complained, but our late editor, whose kids played Dixie Ball, didn't give a rat's patoot.

Here are some ideas:

• It's a great time for an outdoors feature. I accompanied some locals preparing for a bowfishing tournament and wrote an awesome story about it with lots of photos. People love these.
• As Batman said, photo packages are a great way to fill space and sell some papers. Parents love seeing cute pictures of their kids at the local football or baseball camp.
• Summer high school baseball. The local teams at my old shop would play some games and we'd go out, write a nice update feature and shoot some photos.
• If you live where football is king, write about what the teams are doing in the offseason (weight training, 7-on-7, etc.) It might not be much, but people will read anything related to football and it give you an opportunity to hype your football tab.
• There are a lot of golf tournaments during the summer. Don't cover it like it's the PGA, but a nice story with some results and some photos will be a hit as well.

 

[QUOTE="Bamadog, post: 4061423, member: 2742

Don't be like my second shop, where we covered Dixie Baseball like it was the Super Bowl from when preps ended in May to the start of football season. I actually worked harder during that time than during football and basketball because of the endless tournaments. Readers complained, but our late editor, whose kids played Dixie Ball, didn't give a rat's patoot.


[/QUOTE]

My shop made a conscious decision around 2000 to scale back youth baseball coverage to just state tournaments and World Series. Best decision we ever made.

We did have a serious youth baseball story fall into our lap about 10 years ago that turned out to be probably the best thing I ever did in my career. I got a call from a youth baseball mom one afternoon and she was complaining that the local Dixie Youth facility was a death trap, that a 7 YO kid had been hit by a car chasing a foul ball a few days earlier, and while he wasn't seriously injured, the next kid might not be so lucky. At the time, the park was wedged into a residential neighborhood and backed right onto a city street that, while not a main drag, had enough traffic to make it a hazard.

Long story short, I did a Sunday feature on the problem and we started advocating for a new safer facility for the program, including getting the city government from dragging its feet on the issue (they wanted to keep the program in the city rather than see it move to the outskirts of town). The city finally relented and kicked in some money, the program got an MLB grant, raised a ton of private donations and a new facility was built at one of the big parks on the outer edges of the city.