There is more to baseball than batters and pitchers

Posted on June 15, 2010

Oakland Athletics catcher Landon Powell #35 chases a foul ball during the game against the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park on June 13, 2010 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Brad Mangin)

 

From the first pitch of spring training to the final out of the World Series I will shoot over 90 baseball games in a season. This is a really good thing because I love shooting baseball. However, in order to last through the entire season without going insane I need to mix up my shooting every once in awhile so I don’t bore the crap out of my own worst critic and harshest editor: Me. When the season starts it is necessary for me to shoot the meat and potatoes stuff like batters and pitchers as there are so many new players in new uniforms, etc. But after a few months it is fun to spend a day at the park having fun and goofing around like I did on Sunday.

The Oakland A’s were playing the third and final game of their weekend interleague series against the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon. Game time was 1:05 pm, so I knew the light would be awful, especially compared to the great light we had the night before when the game started at 6:05 pm. Since it is the middle of June and I already have tons of nice stock images of both teams, I thought it would be fun to mess around and shoot from one of my favorite positions: inside first base. This is a cool spot at the Giants ballpark where we sit down low below ground level in a trench behind the first base on deck circle looking up the third base line. From there you can see the entire field in front of you, and home plate is REAL close.

When I am this close to home plate and sitting down at ground level I like to shoot tight details with the 400mm lens. I especially like shooting the feet of certain batters as they break out of the batters box. This works much better if the batter wears high socks that add some color to the picture, like A’s speedy lead-off man Rajai Davis (see above). Davis started wearing some very unusual socks last season that no one else wears. Not only do they feature the famous A’s logo on them, they also have his number (11) stitched into them with gold thread. Shooting tight feet like this is really hit and miss, with mostly misses as keeping them in focus and framing them properly is very hard. However, it is fun to get a frame I like and it sure breaks things up when I get home to edit my take.

Another thing I am fascinated about when I sit down there is the home plate umpire. All umps have different styles and mannerisms. Some are more active than others and some like to put on a show. I spent the entire game looking out for umpire Tim Timmons to see what he was doing. I especially liked it when he would run up the first base line to chase a foul ball to my right. This enabled him to show up in front of me with the blue sky in the background, which is one of my favorite features at AT&T Park because there is no high upper deck in the outfield to block the sky.

Sure I shot some “normal” stuff during the game, but it was the different stuff I shot that made this game so much fun for me. That and the fact that the Giants won again to sweep the weekend series! I encourage everyone to break the rules as much as possible when they go out shooting. Use a really long lens when you are close to your subject and use a wide lens when you are far away. Break things up. I promise you that your take from a given game will be much more fun to edit and your editor will appreciate the way you see. After all, you are expected to bring back pictures that show how YOU see the game, not how others do.