Virginia head coach Dave Leitao
This image summed up UVA’s day against Florida State. UVA was held to 3 of 23 shooting in the first half — with only 5 points over the first 13:45 of the first half. Not good. In this image, Leitao was disputing an official’s call. It didn’t really matter as UVA fell to FSU 73-62. Virginia had some interesting runs in the second half which pretty much kept it even for the half, but the team had trouble pulling back a 14 point half time deficit. This shot was taken from the opposite end of the court at 200mm. Typical of a Coach Leitao shot are the open mouth and displaced necktie. 
Jump Around…
Tonight’s game was a good one… #16 UVA hosted #22 FSU in NCAA women’s basketball. FSU came into the game undefeated in ACC. This image is of the UVA bench celebrating as their team cut a double digit second half FSU lead down to 1 point. It was fun to see the comeback and the crowd get into it… despite the late second half surge, Virginia fell 80-75 to the Seminoles. The game was unusually physical with plenty of fouls – most of which came from FSU… including this Alysha Harvin clothesline of Britnee Milner. The loss was the first home loss of the season for the Wahoos…
Tyler Hansbrough: Making it look easy
UNC’s Tyler Hansbrough did a number on UVA last night. Last year’s National Player of the Year lit Virginia up for 28 points. He also has a knack for getting to fouled… here’s a good example. Like the Xavier shot I wrote about earlier, this shot was from an overhead remote that was set to fire the motor drive (non-strobed) whenever I triggered my hand held camera (Canon 1D Mark III which doesn’t lag very well no matter what I do). This was one of six total camera angles that I shot last night (including hand held).
Sam’s Club
So, tonight was the #5 UNC v UVA men’s basketball game. Probably the biggest game of the season for UVA’s John Paul Jones Arena… all the local media and photogs were there, plus a bunch of others from NC and around the country. Students showed up which was nice after shooting a dozen or so games over winter break with no students around. This shot is of a group of students who were wearing Sam’s Club vests in honor of Virginia point guard Sammy Zeglinski.
I was pretty happy with how things turned out. My remotes worked. My lights worked.
Assane Sene – Virginia’s intimidating 7 foot first-year
Assane Sene has played in most of Virginia’s games this season — eight games so far. I’m really impressed with this guy’s intensity on and off the court. When he and/or his team makes a big play, he shows it. When he misses a few free throws you can tell he’s ticked at himself. This shot is of him defending an inbound baseline pass against Brown University — an intimidating force for anyone to try and throw a basketball past. It’s great to see and be able to photograph someone with so much enthusiasm and emotion on the court.
Tip Off
ACC season has already started and is coming to JPJ soon. This shot was taken from the catwalk at tip off of last night’s women’s game vs St. Francis. The PocketWizards that trigger my strobe system were once again not working, and I went up just before the start of the game to find out why. Channels had been changed… again… Not cool. 
So, I was upstairs for tip off and took this shot. It was a fairly interesting game — not as exciting as the Georgia game, but St. Francis held on for a lot longer than they were expected to (35-35 at half), largely on some pretty nice 3 point shooting and lots of UVA turnovers. Virginia took control in the second half….
Smoking in black and white
Today has been a get things done in the office day… there are no basketball games so I’ve been cleaning, organizing, paying bills, keywording and pulling some images from my archive to send to a colleague. I came across this photo that I took back in June 2008 out in Mendocino, California. The photographer in the picture is Dan Heller (who writes a very insightful blog on the photography business). Dan led a workshop that I was attending that week and this was one of the many people we came across. She was our waitress a the local restaurant that we all stopped by for lunch and then we saw her walking on the street smoking a cigarette… more me the intriguing part of the moment wasn’t so much there was a young woman walking down the street smoking but rather that there were 4 or 5 photographers taking her photo.
Xavier’s Kenny Frease from Above
The #22 Xavier men’s NCAA basketball team came to town to play UVA. Remote camera and Pocketwizard Gremlins appear to have been tamed and things started clicking for the first time in several games. This image was taken from the catwalk above one of the baskets. Since I cannot consistently lag my Canon 1D Mark III (shutter lag values range all over the place), I occasionally use this body up from above with either my 180mm macro lens (as I did today) or 70-200mm and set to shoot on ambient light. I place it on the side of the court where I’m sitting shooting with my hand held — every time I fire my hand held camera this remote is listening on the same channel as the strobes are and it fires 4-6 frames each time. The result is that I often get several frames in an aerial view of a good play where I only can get one shot with my strobed hand held. It’s a nice combination.
Women’s NCAA Hoops – Key Play
Enonge Stovall (40) grabbed an offensive rebound off a missed free throw with 22 seconds left and the score UVA 60 Georgia 58. She was also fouled on the play by Porsha Phillips (21) and made both of her free throw attempts to seal the game (final score 62-60) for the Cavaliers. This was one of the more exciting hoops games at JPJ in a while. Virginia was down by as much as 5 in the second half and rallied to retake the lead in the final minutes. This was the second SEC team that UVA has defeated this year (they beat Tennessee on the road earlier). Shooting wise, it was a good start to the New Year.
The only problem with tonight’s game was related to my Multimax that is triggered (on a delay) for my remote cameras. The other Multimax on my system (which my hand held camera uses to fire the strobes) was doing fine, no problems… nothing but crickets on the remote MM. Headed up to the catwalk and discovered a new error message on the MM saying something to the effect “Auto Shutdown Initiated. Power cycle to turn on.” It’s fascinating to me that if the MM powered down on it’s own, that it was nice enough to stay awake to display this message. Why couldn’t it just stay awake and receive transmissions like it’s supposed to? Thus, combined with all the other troubles experienced with this part of my system earlier in the year, that it definitely is related to the power source. So, I just put in batteries and it worked perfectly the rest of the game… it’s going to really suck to have to haul up to the catwalk before and after every game to take care of batteries and powering off the radio, but looks like that’s the current solution until I can get another power supply.
This was the only remote shot that really worked out tonight – I’m still struggling to find a decent angle to position my backboard remotes for the women’s games. Generally a more vertical angle (i.e. straight down) seems to work better, whereas for the men, roughly 45 degrees seems to work. Different camera positions (high, low, wide, etc) with respect to the glass also change things. As ACC season is starting up soon, I’m getting close to locking down exactly the way I want it. The men play #22 Xavier (who broke my 70-200mm lens hood with an errant shot in their shoot around this afternoon) tomorrow… argh.
