d3photography.com

Around the gridiron the phrase using your head is often associated with a direct helmet-to-helmet hit. Something that is neither a good thing to do or witness, and may send chills down the backs of the spectators, coaches, officials and sports medicine staff.

I was witness to a Monmouth (Ill.) player who took such a hard hit against St. John’s (Minn.) in the opening round of the 2005 playoffs that play was stopped for at least a half hour after being knocked unconscious and he had a seizure on the field. He was taken by stretcher to an ambulance off the side of the stadium where he was kept until after the game, when he had regained feeling in his toes, and spent a few days in a St. Cloud hospital.

Click thumbnail to see full shot

This past weekend I witnessed a potentially similar scenario play out as a Central Dutch linebacker made a delayed hit on the just out-of-bounds on Coe receiver Andrew Squires. While it appeared that Squires was not injured on the apparent helmet-on-helmet hit, the linebacker was spoken to by an official and Coe head coach Steve Stalker shared his dislike for the contact with the official. Nothing came of the play in the rulings on the field, however.

So that’s the harrowing side of the use of one’s head in a game. We’d like to highlight to fun, exciting and remarkable side of the subject: Having the wherewithal in the game to make an outstanding decision at a key moment that seals the victory or turns the tables, or is just simply remarkable.

Their head is in the game and the pivotal play comes to, well, “mind”.

A sequence set of Mellick's forced fumble-turned-touchback on Saturday.

Coe’s Dillon Mellick did just that a few minutes earlier in the game. Central’s Mike Furlong had caught a pass inside the Coe red zone and he had Mellick beat by a step. But he stepped up, forcing the ball out of Furlong’s hands which bounced out on the five yard line and bounced into the back of the endzone for a Cohawk touchback.

As Mellick told the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

“I got burned on it,” the senior from Waukon said. “But I could see he was holding the ball wide, so I just went for it all and got it.”

That heads-up decision, with the score 30-28 in Coe’s favor, helped seal the victory. They padded it later with a touchdown and timely interception with less than two minutes remaining. No. 9 Coe held on to defeat No. 7 Central 37-28.

There is more to it than just making a great play

St Scholastica's Greg Doornink (4) heads the ball over St Thomas' Mike Hutton (22) on Sept. 21.

In soccer, using your head has a different connotation: using your head to make a header. That’s where this blog came to on Thursday afternoon while covering the St. Thomas vs. St. Scholastica men’s soccer match. As Matt Milless wrote last week in “Did you get that?” finding that stop-action photo that makes you look at it in wonder and amazement, such as the header, is very difficult to capture consistently, if at all, for periods of time.

We, as photographers, may make it look easy, that we get those photos a lot if you look at our best works; but at d3photography.com we strive on the quality of the work we publish, not the quantity of the photos we take at an event. I don’t mean to generalize wire photographers here, but there are many who will fire off many thousands of photos in a quarter of football, half of soccer or basketball or a period of a hockey game just to have that “perfect” shot for the game. They may take 1,000-2,500 photos in a given window of a game and run one, two, 10 or 20 photos in a gallery online, a couple of pictures in the next publication – if space allows.

Our photographers work to include all the relevant photos from a game for news purposes, but also for the purposes of the fans to see, and have a memory of the game.

In the St. Thomas vs. St. Scholastica match from last week, out of the 193 photos published in our photo gallery I had 19 photos of attempted headers. Most of them were spot on (by the players) and the looks on their faces and the displacement of the air in the ball is apparent.

As you will see on the right, a “perfect header photo” (just like a perfect slapshot, baseball liner, basketball jumpshot) is right when the ball shows no displacement of air.

But who really wants to see a perfectly shaped ball, anyway?

Go inside to more photos from our photographers

(continue reading…)

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Are you a die-hard fan of Division III athletics? Do you own a digital SLR camera with a good lens? Are you willing to shoot and upload your photos within a few hours of an event? Can you shoot a couple of events a month through the school year?

Then we might just be looking for you. We’re looking to expand around the country. On the map below, we’re looking for photographers in states where there are NCAA Division III schools, the full color circles are where we currently have photographers, some of them are extremely dense regions (Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles) and we’re looking for a few photographers there.

There’s more to Division III than football. We also cover Mens and Womens Soccer for D3soccer.com, Mens and Womens basketball for D3hoops.com and baseball for D3baseball.com. Starting in October, 2010, we will be covering Division I Womens Ice Hockey and Division III Mens and Womens Ice Hockey for USCHO.com, and we also cover Division I Mens Ice Hockey for CollegeHockeyNews.com

There are a few things you need to know before contacting us:

1. We have both a flexible deadline and expectations. We expect you to do the editing, uploading of both proof images shortly after the game and the full resolution files within a couple days of the game.
2. We do not pay per game. You are paid a percentage out of your sales. All of our photographers are paid in this manner and we have been operating this way since 2003.
3. We do not reimburse mileage, meals or food. You can write those off on your taxes out of your sales next spring.
4. You are expected to be your own salesperson at events. While we give you resources to help you (shirts, sweatshirts [for purchase], business card designs, marketing on facebook and on our media partner websites) you need to make your sales happen.
5. We’re a resale outlet for you. We will sell on your behalf, we will provide images to newspapers, schools, other media outlets that come to us.
6. You own your images. You’re just letting us resell them to make you some extra income and give the fans something to look at and hold on to remember the games by.
7. This is “At will employment.” And you are a contractor. We will not take taxes out of your sales.

Are you still interested? Send a link to your portfolio, your coverage area and experiences to newshooter@d3photography.com

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We’re less than four weeks away from the start of the football season, 22 days to the start of soccer here in Minnesota with a kickoff scheduled for 1pm on September 1st (the UMAC’s Crown plays at the MIAC’s Hamline in Women’s Soccer).

• We’ve had our photo store officially shut down since the first of the year, but will be reopening it on September 1st, offering shipping at 50% off for the entirety of September (pay for your prints by 11:59 PM Central time on September 30th to receive the discount).
• We’ve been kept busy during the off season with a variety of non-sports blogs here but also recently wrapped up work. D3jobs.com has received a complete face-lift and software overhaul as well as upgrades to portions of D3football.com’s Kickoff preview.
• By the end of 2010 d3photography.com will host all of its photo galleries within the website itself, Pictureprints.net will be phased out in favor of this new photo store.
• Conferences and Schools will also have a new library tool to select photos for their websites, complete with cropping tool and widget add-on for their websites that will make our photos available for them to display on their websites with ease.
• In October we will start providing photos to a new media partner, USCHO.com, for Division III Men’s and Women’s Ice Hockey and Division I Women’s Ice Hockey.

We welcome Greg Kremer of Sartell, Minn., on as a full member of our photography group.

If you know of someone interested in having their work promoted through d3photography.com, or have existing services available please feel free to send them to joinus@d3photography.com. Please be sure to include links to your work online or as attachments. We are looking for photographers that love to shoot for the sake of the art and the game (all sports) and can edit and upload their photos in a timely fashion.

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This weekend Dave Kisor turned to me and told me that he was really impressed with all the work we put into the College World Series… and by “we” he meant Pat Coleman, Jim Dixon (both of D3sports.com) and Larry Radloff and myself (for d3photography.com). He also mentioned that he used to just look at the photo galleries and like the photos he saw, but never knew how much goes into a game from start to finish.

He suggested we post a video of what it takes to do the work, I figured I’d make it easier on you to follow by posting it here on the blog.

This was our Saturday, and there might be a few omissions or errors in what I report so please bear with me.

1:00 AM: Return to hotel from Friday games. Start editing the games from the previous day
3:00: Put the computer away and fall asleep
6:30: Wake up and finish editing job for schools that are expecting DVDs of images that morning.
8:30: Roll out of bed after falling back asleep and get ready for the next day.

9:05: Arrive at the Fox Cities Stadium, unload the gear out of the car and meet Larry Radloff in the press box.
9:45: Larry starts shooting the warmups of the first game. I continue to set up my equipment in the press box.
10:15: I continue editing those games from 1AM and 6:30 this morning.
~12:45: Game 1 finishes, I’ve finished the editing and DVD burning and labeling of the games from yesterday. Starting to upload them to the server. (continue reading…)

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