Dodged a Huge Bullet Saturday, Had Fun Friday Night

Whew! FSU dodged a huge bullet Saturday afternoon on the heels of a very emotional win down in Miami last weekend. The offense was sluggish all day, FSU's QB was having one of those days where timing was nowhere to be found, but the defense bucked up and held BC to nothing but field goals. That keeps FSU in the hunt for a BCS bowl as it heads into a bye week with a 6-1 record and preparations for a Thursday night game against NC State the following week.

I had a decent game photo-wise this past weekend, managing to catch a couple of FSU TD's on "swing over at the last minute, fire away and pray the focus locked in" kind of shots (above) after setting up behind or near the end zone in anticipation of runs up the middle. Gotta hand it to the ol' D300 with the 80-200mm, it managed to make up for my inability to predict what was going to happen and zeroed in on FSU players as they dove into the end zone. It helped that I was able to use my 1.4X TC on the setup (it was a noon game, so shooting at f4 was not an issue this game) so I could get tighter on the shots.

A highlight of the game was meeting Amie Beasley and shooting most of the game next to her as we chatted about all things photography. I thought I was pretty passionate about sports photography but it was really neat to see the passion oozing out of Amie. For many photographers, shooting a game involves going through the motions, same old, same old, just another day. It was a treat to see how much she was enjoying going about her work.

Since it was a noon game, I used my 200-400mm f4 on the D3 and as I mentiond above, the 80-200mm f2.8 w/a 1.4X TC on the D300. Settings were Manual exposure, ISO200, f4 with shutter speeds from 1/1000th to 1/1250th second, although I would dial the shutter speeed dowm, sometimes as slow as 1/400th, for shots into the crowd, etc. During pre-game activities, I used the 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 on the D300, which gave me a great focal range for a variety of photos including the shot of the team taking the field (lead photo- shot from the stands behind the end zone) and of Osceola planting the spear at midfield (below).

Oh, did I mention that I managed not to forget anything this game? That's two games in a row! Maybe I have finally gotten rid of those demons and can just shoot games for a while. Here are a couple of more photos from the game, and if you would like to see more, I have posted a gallery of some 40 images on my Facebook page (Mike Olivella).

JAM WITH COACH HAM - Friday night, FSU opened basketball practice with the annual Jam With Coach Ham festivities at Tully Gym on FSU's campus. Tully is where the FSU Volleyball team plays its home matches and it's always a struggle to shoot there because of the lighting. But, this year's event was a lot of fun with te players putting on a show. They "danced" (I'm using the term loosely) with the Golden Girls to Michael Jackson's "Thriller", there was a scrimmage, a three point contest and a dunk contest.

I've mentioned the challenges of shooting at Tully Gym before when posting volleyball photos. I was at ISO 1600 using nothing but f 2.8 lenses and pretty much avoided shooting anything meaningful with the D300 to minimize the amount of noise in my photos. On the D3, I used my 15mm f2.8 fisheye for a few shots of the cheerleaders and Golden Girls, and the 35-70mm for the action shots (sitting or standing directly next to the basket support). Shutter speed was pushed as much as I could, mostly at 1/320th second, which was barely fast enough.



As with the football game, I have created and posted a gallery of images from the basketball event on my Facebook page, so if you'd like to see more images, you know where to go.