This week’s column entirely focuses on men’s basketball. On Saturday, the Tigers fell to Texas 85-68 at Mizzou Arena, marking the team’s second home loss this season. Here are the photos of the week.
I hadn’t initially planned to get a photo of Annor Boateng at this game. It just so happened that he was the one who ended up in my viewfinder when I lifted my camera above my head and tried to frame up my shot between players’ heads after introductions. That being said, I think it was probably a good
opportunity to get photos of him interacting with the team in the first home game after his injury to use if there are future updates on his condition. I do wish my composition here would have been a bit cleaner considering other players’ heads, but I’m also limited by my height in situations like this.
This shot of players huddling can definitely get repetitive, so it gets to a point where I either stop taking it or look for ways to make it more unique, like here with a different lighting situation. Under this warmer low lighting, the players look more relaxed than they would under the normal arena lighting but I can also feel the anticipation building as the game begins. Looking back, it is kind of funny (not really, but still) that the lights make the players look orange-ish, like Texas.
I got a lot of great photos of Jayden Stone at this game, which makes sense considering that he was Missouri’s highest scorer, tied with Mark Mitchell. Between photos of him celebrating, high-fiving fans and all the action photos, it was difficult to cut down on which ones to use here, but I eventually landed on this one and one more later on. I was placed on the home bench side for both halves which meant I had to shoot defense in the first half and ended up missing the actual dunk, but after we went to a media timeout Stone finally reacted and I happened to be in the best position to get good shots of it.
Gates’ frustration with the refereeing was pretty obvious throughout the game. There were several moments when he clearly said things like “ref, what did he do?” and yelled at the referees to call a foul. I do like to get photos of Gates, other coaches and the bench occasionally, and keeping that in mind as well as the context of it not being a great game for the Tigers as well as knowing Gates’ criticism would likely be brought up in recap articles, I decided I wanted to get a picture of him reacting. I kept an eye out for Gates along the sideline as the game went on and was able to get this photo during a free throw attempt.
I recently received some feedback from one of my photojournalism professors about my basketball photography that made me approach this game a bit differently than usual. This semester, I’m also working as a staff photojournalist with the Columbia Missourian and every four weeks we have to turn in a drive with three full takes of assignments from our shifts to be critiqued. I included photos from a high school basketball game I covered that went to double overtime and my professor pointed out that while basketball is a very vertical sport, I tend to only shoot vertically during free throws. Considering that, I did try to shoot more verticals during this game and I came back with this shot of Pierce’s dunk that I really liked.
I’m including one more of Jayden Stone that I like. I really appreciate photos like this where the full bodies of opposing players are in frame facing toward me and there’s the typical sense of tension felt between the two competitors. One detail I especially like about this photo that I don’t normally see is Stone dribbling the ball between his legs. The ball is frozen mid-air and I feel like the orientation of the lines on the ball is very aesthetically pleasing.
I’ll wrap things up with this fun shot of Truman. I don’t get too many shots of Truman at basketball games because I’m not moving around anywhere near as much as I am with football where I usually get a good picture of him at every game. Maybe I’m too focused on the action in front of me to notice if he does more crowd interactions, but it can be difficult to get interesting feature content when I’m planted in one spot the whole time. Truman happened to be interacting with people sitting courtside (and fist-bumping photographers) when he started dancing and making the ‘horns down’ gesture and I knew I had to get a photo of it.
Come back for more men’s basketball coverage next week as the Tigers take on Vanderbilt!
