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Watching the Yankees-Rangers game on ESPN right now seeing Gary Pettis’ ejection over a close call at first (I think the umps were right) reminds me of today’s St. Thomas/Gustavus matchup. Cody Sukalski hit a slow chopper to second and I put the photo in our gallery of his foot on the bag with Firstbaseman John Means’ foot on the bag, stretched out and the ball is still at least two feet away from making contact. [box score: play-by-play]

He was called out. It won’t change the outcome of the game by any means now – it wasn’t the last play of the game with the bases loaded and Gustavus wasn’t even threatening. But check out the photo.

Umpires are fallible. Mistakes happen. Close calls are forgivable, but this one wasn’t. Close that is.

As photographers we’re all about the freeze-frame. That single snapshot (pun intended) that defines a moment and this was one of them.

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Without officials / referees, the sports that we love so much wouldn’t happen. They often take heat from fans and coaches for their calls. They have an incredibly tough job being they are right in the middle of the action. Unfortunately, sometimes they get too close to the action as this football referee experienced. Do you have any photos or stories of officials that got just a little too close to the action?

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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.

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”.

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

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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One of the most frequent questions I am asked when photographing sports is; did you get that shot?  This is most often referring to a shot, a hit, or often a foul or infraction of some kind.  It is very difficult to explain that in a still photograph the action is stopped; so unless you capture a foot right on a line as a player lands, it can be very hard to reflect an infraction via a still image.  This past week, while shooting the Ithaca vs. Union game, I had the opportunity to capture a clear infractions.  In this image the ball is a second away from reaching the receiver and the defender has prematurely grabbed the arm of the receiver which is clearly pass interference.  In this instance it turned out to be a no call, but my image could in fact prove the infraction.  Nevertheless, the game went on, the athletes played hard, and it was a great competition.  I add this disclaimer.   This is in no way a criticism of the referees as they have a challenging job, and honestly no one understands better the challenges of seeing things from all angles than a photographer.  Happy football season to all, and I hope your team wins!

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Peek-a-boo — now you see him, and now you don’t.

Read the full story here.

One of Getty’s freelance photographers, Marc Feldman, took multiple photos of golfer Matt Bettencourt at the same moment during the Reno-Tahoe Open golf tournament. In one he removed a distracting person from behind the golfer, in the other he left the photo as is. Photojournalistic policy and ethics follow the rule that the content of a photo should not bet edited, only exposure, contrast and minor color correction.

Should the photographer have altered the image? Was Getty right to hand him his pink slip? Should the truth of the situation take priority over aesthetics? Is Getty’s reaction appropriate? How important is the integrity of the photo?

I understand where Getty is coming from with my background in photojournalism. In the end he probably should be terminated since he took reprehensible actions regarding the manipulation of the photo. However, I don’t think this is as serious an infraction as others that have happened in recent years where photographers misrepresented a photo and the events transpiring it supposedly captured. Taking out the distracting figure doesn’t try to suggest something happened that didn’t. It looks better, but he shouldn’t have done it.

When I shoot a sport sometimes all my photos won’t be perfect and I just have to deal with it. Things happen very quickly and you just have to react. There isn’t always time to change position or get the ideal composition. A lot of times you have to do the best you can with what you have to work with.

This makes me wonder why the photographer made the change to the photo. Why alter the image? Was he not confident about his work? Did he realize what he was doing and the repercussions it might have?

If this wasn’t done for news purposes I wouldn’t really care what was changed to get a good photo. For a news or journalistic photo only the minimum should be done during editing. I definitely admire and respect a photographer more if they can get quality photos without much editing being done after taking them.

Take a look at this softball photo I took a while ago. This one I edited in a similar manner to the Getty photographer in Photoshop a few years ago. At the time it was a challenge to myself and a test of my Photoshop skills to see if I could edit the girl’s body out and it was never used in print or online. In other words for journalism it is ok to crop the pitcher to a vertical image, but not ok to remove the head from the horizontal photo. The logic here is a bit of a gray area. The ultimate goal is to uphold journalistic integrity.

Reporting and photographing anything for journalism is about telling the truth of what happened. Try and compose the best possible photo when taking the photo. If you have to do too much editing or change the background after taking the photo, then you didn’t take a high quality photo.

With everything we as photographers can do with Photoshop it has become a crutch. It’s hard to believe Photoshop is 20 years old and it has become second nature to use as a tool of photography. We can’t forget what it’s really about as a photojournalist. The truth, reality and accuracy of a photo are the most important aspects of reporting on an event. Film photography never allowed the creative liberties of Photoshop.

As Ansel Adams once said, “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” The line is constantly blurring between art and truth in photography. This photographer being fired is an unfortunate example of upholding photographic standards. People have to trust that the news they are reading about is really an honest account. If they cannot then we are compromising our integrity and virtues as journalists.

[Editor's note: Jeff Levy is a freelance photographer based in the central New Jersey. His work has appeared on D3football.com, D3hoops.com, NewJerseyNewsroom.com, Ultimate Athlete Magazine and the Erie Times-News just to name a few. You can find his photography portfolio on his website at jefflevyphoto.com]

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So here I am at my “mobile office” in South Minneapolis having just witnessed the end of the longest professional tennis match in history, now a Goliath in terms of records:

1. Most games in a match (163)
2. Most games in a set (138)
3. Longest match in terms of time played (11 hours, 05 minutes)
4. Most aces in a match – pair (215)
5. Most aces in a match – individual player (112 – John Isner; Nicolas Mahut had 103)

The line? Oh that’s really easy. It rolls right off the tongue: 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (7-3), 70-68.

70-68? Yes, that’s right. 138 games in the final set.

But what does this have to do with how the internet has changed Photography and Sports in general? We’re in the midst of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. And I’m not there. But I have witnessed many tennis and soccer matches. Incredibly, all played on grass (not so incredible when you realize that all Wimbledon matches are on grass – the only ITA major played on grass courts), but more incredibly all watched via the internet in the Twin Cities.

The local ABC affiliate has dropped “normal” programming on the weekends to show FIFA action, which is fine if you are near a TV on the weekends and we’ve had too nice of weekends the last few weeks to allow for inside sport watching. But did they drop airing “The View” for the USA-Algeria match yesterday morning? No.

The internet has turned us into a “must have it right now” generation. From standard photography (i.e. digital photography) to our terminal love for sport (golf, football, tennis, soccer, baseball, basketball) we want to see it right here, right now on whatever we have available at our finger tips.

News. Photos. Videos. If it happened five minutes ago, we want it yesterday. There was a time in the newsprint industry that newspapers had evening editions to get that breaking news out there. Television helped do away with that tradition.

Like it or not, we are in a cut-throat world of get the images, results, everything (often including the kitchen sink) out onto the air waves, the internet, into the editor’s hands as quickly as possible to “steal” the news cycle.

It’s a world of adapt or go home. We can’t survive out there as easily anymore recording on analog anything. Digital photography, digital video, digital audio recorders, high speed internet access, live streams with (or without) commentary. If you don’t have it, the fans won’t come to you as their resource.

But if you have it, and you have it first, then you are at the top of the heap reaping the benefits of the public eye. And, in the case of one of our partners, the occasional overwhelming crush of traffic that brings one of the few caveats that comes with the attention.

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