We’re back to your regularly scheduled programming this week! This week’s coverage (pushed back a day to include women’s basketball) includes photos from swim and dive’s meet against Vanderbilt and McKendree
and women’s basketball’s season opener win against Central Arkansas.
Coach Grevers is known to be very animated during meets, and keeping that in mind, I knew I could get some nice reaction pictures out of him. As a former swimmer and coach, Karen mentioned that this sort of arm action is typically executed from the pool deck during distance races (like the 1000) to let an athlete know if they are on pace or not (notice the stopwatch in his hand). The 1000 freestyle is 40 lengths of the pool, and as such, it’s hard to know if you’re on the right track, which is where Grevers comes in.
It’s important to remain aware of your surroundings, not only for safety purposes when shooting (who knows when you could get barreled over while covering sports? Or in this case, bumped into and pushed into the pool), but also in case you miss something important or a cool detail or emotion shot like this one. I’m always looking around when I’m working for this very reason, and I was really happy to get a shot like this.
I’m not religious, but God bless reflective goggles. I actually had no idea swimmers got a visual cue for the start until I got this photo. I set up this shot with the intention of getting close up photos of the Missouri swimmer before he executed his backstroke start. It wasn’t until I looked back at my take that I noticed out of all the photos I took, only this one had a green light reflecting in his goggles. Truthfully, without that small detail, I may not have even kept this photo because it was pretty uninteresting compared to the vision I had.
By the way: I try not to have a vision in mind in most cases when shooting because it’s difficult to replicate it when people are unpredictable in their actions. Because this is a repetitive action, it’s a little easier to plan for and compose, just like the shot of Maya Sands serving while standing on the word “MIZZOU” from a few weeks ago.
What I really like in this photo compared to a lot of the other ones I took and kept is that Katie Gresik’s hand is mid-stroke and angled in such a way that it’s close enough to her body in the frame that I can crop in easily (per Karen, it’s also really good technique). One of the hardest things when taking photos is ensuring the subject is properly framed or composed and we can crop in without it looking awkward. This is especially difficult in sports like swimming, basketball, baseball/softball and golf where limbs or equipment are extended outwards and can result in some awkward crops with an uncomfortable amount of negative space. I was pretty pleased by this one though.
Remember how I always say it’s not preferable to use photos where peoples’ faces aren’t visible? Well sometimes there are exceptions, and I personally like this one. This photo is of sophomore Peyton Drexel diving off the starting block during the final event of the meet, the 400 yard freestyle relay. I’m not particularly a huge fan of this angle, and looking back I would have knelt down to get a better one if I had had the presence of mind to set up the shot that way. Considering that though, I feel like there’s a really nice separation here between Drexel and the background, I love that her foot is still in the middle of pushing off the block and that there’s so much water splashing in the air in front of her. Especially with the water, I think it adds a lot to emphasize the action and intensity of the relay that we can see a lot with swim photos.
Moving on to women’s basketball, we’ll start with this photo of Ma’Riya Vincent rising to take a shot. I love here that Vincent is sandwiched between two opponents and has her arm raised ready to take a shot while Central Arkansas’ Julianna Gibson reaches to block her. If we want to get into color theory, this is a perfect example of complementary colors: purple and yellow (or gold, if we want to get technical). Think of the Vikings or the Lakers. It’s a really nice color combination here.
What I really like here is that we see Shannon Dowell preparing to attempt a 3-pointer but we can see her teammate Reka Toman putting up three fingers behind her (the kicker is: she didn’t make this shot). I considered cropping up from the bottom here since I accidentally cut her off at the knees (we prefer to avoid cropping or cutting people off at joints), but ultimately chose not to so the people sitting on the bench were still visible and not cut off in an awkward way.
This photo was a nice moment I wasn’t planning to capture. Rock M women’s basketball writer Dylan Heinrich requested a photo of a group of the injured players. I wasn’t sure if these were the right people, but I framed up my shot to get this photo during a free throw attempt, not knowing this was something they did when one of their teammates made a free throw. It really added to the visual interest of the photo, as opposed to what it could have been if it was just a photo of them sitting there doing nothing special.
I hope this was a smooth transition back into our normal schedule of posting. Check back in next week for some photos from volleyball, football and men’s basketball!
