Clovis News-Journal: Day 91, College Football without the action

The game started at 6 and I was only able to shoot the 1st half due to deadline. I've been covering high school football for over a month and hadn't seen anything else live. It was nice to see a more skill out there. It was fin to shoot and I got some good action but I'm not going to post that here. This is my favorite hill to shoot between plays as the sun goes down behind it.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 90, Friday Night Lights: Part 5

Another Friday, another Clovis football game. They played Rio Rancho another runnning team. I thenk there were 3 passes the entire 1st half. For the most part, I stunk it up in the first half.I was trying not to focus on the 3 Clovis players who make plays, the running back (28), the fullback and a linebacker. Things did heat up in the 2nd half. I missed the 3rd quarter while editing but, I did get back down to the field for the 4th.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 89, Rodeo Daze

Tonight was the College Daze Rodeo at ENMU. So this basically completes my rodeo experience. I've shot profession rodeo, junior rodeo (k-12) and now college rodeo. Unfortunately there was no tailgaiting. I guess college students jsut don't take rodeo seriously like the do volleyball.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 87, part 2

My editor wanted an agriculture feature for the day. I called around and couldn't get a definite answer to what farms in the area were harvesting crops. So I walked down to the farmers' market and hung around there in decent light. I can't complain, I could walk to the assignment and the light was good.

In case you wondered, these are "Big Jim" peppers.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 87

Today I had a nice easy pace to it. I came in and worked on photos from Saturday's football game to put on the web. Then I went on my rounds. I setup an assignment for tomorrow and shot at the tiny farmers market here in town.

I ended my day with a 7pm girls soccer game. I've been getting spoiled lately with soccer. It seems like most games happen bettwen 4 and 6pm. The sun was already down when the game started. But it had just gone down. So after about 15 minutes when the sky got a little darker, I setup in the east side of the field and shot west.

Live from the Hole -- Knives in the Attic

I went to work on my story about this guy in a local band Sunday night. I ended up getting to the Hole late and I missed them play. Apperently the Hole is the only place in this town to hear local and small name rock/alternative music. Most places that have live music, have country.

The next band that came on was Knives in the Attic. They put on a pretty good show and I had fun shooting it.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 86, Saturday afternoon lights?

Today was Saturday afternoon high school football. The team was playing a Texas team in Amarillo. The stadium was gorgeous. It had field turf and actually felt more like a nice small college stadium than high school. Apparently they only use it for high school games and it's owned by the school system.

One of the nice things about shooting an early afternoon game 100 miles from home is that I got to stay for the entire game and didn't have to worry about transmiting at half time. Because of this, I decided to try something different in the second half. I left my 300 in the press box and shot only with my 17-35 and my 70-200. I shot a lot more features and not much action. The action I did shoot, I shot it differently from the stuff I shot in the first half.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 85, Friday Night Lights: Part 4

Some of the outlaying towns around here are pretty small, but they still have football teams. One version of football for a small school is 8-man football. Basically take out 2 offensive linemen and the fullback. Really, it's more like backyard ball with pads. I couldn't determine any set plays, besides when Melrose was on defense, one of the coaches kept yelling "MONKEY, MONKEY, MONKEY 23!" So I guess they were running a monkey 23 defense. On the offensive side of the ball, one of two things happened. Either everyone went deep (much like backyard ball) or the qb kept it and ran. I'm not even going to get to the announcer who had no idea what down it was, who just did what, or how far the last play went for. He had someone in the box giving him the name of the kid that just did something. I was amused.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 83

Today I had one mission and only one mission. That was to watch Arielle get eaten by bears.

I knew that wouldn't happen so I had to settle for taking photos at the circus. That was the only assignment I had. It was pretty nice for a change.





I've been feeling like I'm an observer and not part of my assignments lately. Like I'm there watching but no matter how hard I try, I can't get break down the wall of observer and really feel the event. That really was evident at the circus. Besides having problems getting physically close to what I was shooting, I didn't feel like I could mentally get close.

I really believe this caused my photos to suffer. Looking back I see the circus as me bottoming out and I'm ready to start climbing out from my hole of self doubt.

One of the first thoughts I had was about silhouettes. For the most part they seem pretty overdone, but fun to take. I had this idea that basically, what if silhouettes are amazing backgrounds with just something happening in the foreground that happens to be completely black. Almost like placing an out of focus object in the foreground. So the silhouette is just a framing /composition item.

I had this idea after I made these two photos, but they fall into what I'm thinking. They feel more like my New Mexico sky stuff than anything else.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 81

Yeah, I know, more sports. You'll have to deal for now. I've been shooting a lot of that lately and I'm not quite burnt out on the regular stuff. I'm still finding it fun.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 80, Friday Night Lights: Part 3

We had the second home football game last night. I took Arielle along with me to run cards so I could transmit a few more photos at half time. That worked out pretty well. I'm going to try to convince her to come along with me to Amarillo for the game next week.

As far as the game, I felt like I was in all the right places and most of the good plays happened right in front of me.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 79

For the most part, nothing interesting happened. I did head head down to Eastern to shoot some college volleyball.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 78: Mosquito Guy

Saturday was a very slow day and I had an extra day off because of labor day. It was nice basically having 3 1/2 days to veg out and take care of some things that had been building up.

My first assignment back was to hang out with the vector control officer for the city of clovis. He's the guy who wrangles mosquitos in these here parts. He was a pretty neat guy and I got to walk through the muck with him for a couple hours. I took a ton of photos not really caring how they turned out. After that assignment I felt pretty refreshed and ready to get back to things. There's something about just snapping off tons of photos while having a a good time that's very refreshing. I need to make sure I do that every once in a while.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 76, Friday Night Lights: Part 2

The second week of football. Unfortunately I wasn't able to go to Albuquerque for the Clovis High game so I went down to shoot Portales football. There were some thunderstorms moving in so it made for some interesting light. The game was called with about a minute to go before half time due to lightning.

Clovis News-Journal: Day 75

I had another volleyball match tonight. I've starting do get back to some regular assignment but right now but nothing worth wild yet.