We’re back with more Photos of the Week! Mizzou softball took on LSU this weekend at home, and Dan and I split our coverage on Friday and Saturday. Take a look at what we came back with from the series below!
This photo by Dan really made me stop and stare! There are so many different aspects of this photo that draw me in: the color here is so beautiful and vibrant, there’s an element of repetition with the mass of players and the cropping so nicely divides the screen into three sections of color.
It’s also just generally a fantastic moment to get in terms of the celebration! I’m a huge fan of this shot.
If you’re familiar with photography, you’ll know that it’s difficult to get a shot like this where the bat and ball aren’t showing any motion blur. I asked Dan for his settings to get this shot and found out his shutter was set to 1/4000 of a second (ISO: 400, aperture: f/2.8 for all you nerds out there), an extremely high number even for sports. Despite the high shutter, which is a perfectly fine decision to make in a daytime lighting situation like this, the photo is still exposed properly, because he adjusted his other settings to compensate. The line created by the bat lining up perfectly with the ball is just the cherry on top here, too.
In every baseball or softball game, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get good shots of pitchers and batters because their movements are repetitive and predictable. I really appreciate when people get a variety of angles of this though, because there’s so many different ways to get this shot and endless opportunities to experiment. This composition specifically is one of my favorites because we get the pitcher’s motion, the ball and another player just to the left of pitcher Abby Carr helping to fill the frame and add more visual interest.
Talk about being in the right place at the right moment! According to Dan though, there was more thought to it than just luck: he was initially positioned along the first baseline to get photos of the right handed batters from that side before moving down closer to home plate after Uptegrove advanced to third. Stealing home isn’t a common occurrence, so it’s awesome he was able to get this shot, but in my opinion it’s even more awesome that he had the awareness to anticipate a big play at the plate and move to get a better angle. I did a similar thing earlier in the week during my coverage of a local high school baseball game for the Missourian and the photo and backstory was featured on the J-School’s Instagram page!
I’m sure you’ve picked up on this by now, but I really love clean photos. There’s just something so satisfying in the colors being so clear and separate with little visual clutter. To draw a comparison to Art But Make It Sports, my favorite photograph is “Ratingen Swimming Pool” by Andreas Gursky, another super clean composition color block-wise. Now, I’m definitely no Gursky, but I do try to emulate a similar kind of color cleanliness in my own work like in this case.
Cierra Harrison had a fantastic game! She pitched all seven innings for the shutout win on Saturday and caught two comebackers from back-to-back batters in the sixth inning. While I missed the actual catches, I got this shot of Harrison pitching where she’s lined up nicely between the umpire and batter. You can actually see me sitting behind home plate to get this shot in the background of this video posted on SEC Network’s Instagram page!
With this last photo, taken from the same vantage point as the previous one, I tried to get Linny Ramsey in focus framed over the arm of LSU pitcher Jayden Heavener. As much as I’m a fan of clean photos like the one of Danielle Blackstun from earlier, I’ve been told to experiment a bit more with layering and foreground interest in my compositions. I’m not sure it worked out all that well here, and I wish Ramsey had been just a little more to the right in the frame, but I figured it was interesting enough to include here.
Spring break was definitely needed, but I’m glad to be getting back to work! I hope you enjoyed this week’s column and come back next week for more!
