What a great few weeks. This is my first Fall back in Houston in 3 years. Fall internships have kept me away and its great to be home during this time. I have certainly missed the days when the Houston weather starts to get mild(er) and more importantly I get to cover my hometown Houston Texans and my alma mater, The University of Houston Cougars. I haven’t covered the teams since 2006 so its great to finally get back on the field. I enjoy shooting sports, but its especially exciting when you are shooting a team you root for.

While I was in Florida a few weeks back, my Cougars were beating a then 5th ranked OSU in Oklahoma to propel them to their first AP ranking in about 20 years. The upsets in our bye-week pushed us from 21st to 17th. Everything all week has been building up to Saturday night’s matchup against Big 12 rivals Texas Tech. The atmosphere in and around Robertson Stadium was unlike I have seen since the 2006 CUSA championship game. Former and famed alumni Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler showed up and hung out for the game as well. We had our ranking and we wanted our team to prove it wasn’t a fluke winner and could hang with the big boys.

The game was great with lots of game action and like many other college games, lots of other things to shoot other than the game action. I didn’t get a lot of feature(y) stuff prior to the game, but I highlighted a few of my favorites over on my SportsShooter member page. It is actually featured on their front page as of this morning.

After an incredible 29-28 Houston win and an on field celebration via rushing the field, we were up in the press box editing and transmitting at 12:30am. I left Robertson at 1:30am or so and after celebrating with a few friends, was in bed at about 4:30am.

I woke up 5 hours later to shoot the Texans, Jaguars game.

With high hopes and the meat of our schedule behind us, UH is now ranked 12th in the nation according to this week’s AP poll.

Go Coogs!

What a weekend! Thursday I picked up my Astros season credential at Union Station (cant wait for the home opener) and headed then over to Reliant for my NCAA credentials. It was one post and one week or so ago that I was at Reliant and in that week the whole complex, mainly Reliant Stadium, was transformed from rodeo to march madness. The NCAA set up was excellent as far as facilities go. Good food, good accommodations and organized for us photographers, however the actual set-up of the raised floor and seating were kind of sketchy. Its a huge football stadium so transforming it to accommodate a basketball court is strange. It was a feat for sure and I commend those involved, however with the overall seats being so far away from the action and the team benches being off the court itself it just didn’t feel as intimate as it could have been at the Toyota Center. Regardless, my seat was awesome! I was about 5 feet to the right of one of the goals and about 5 more feet from the baseline, which made for some interesting captures. With the two Sweet Sixteen games on Friday and the Elite 8 regional championship on Sunday I was a bit nervous about my gear scenario. I had shot a limited amount of collegiate and pro basketball in the past so I wanted to make sure I was good to go as far as gear went and having a camera at CPS getting a shutter replaced did not help. When I arrived I met Mark Sutton from Nikon and he was so great to loan me a brand spankin new D3 (Nikon’s new full-frame wonder camera), a 14-24mm 2.8 N, a 70-200mm 2.8 VR and a 300mm 2.8VR. Everything was fresh out the plastic new and ready to roll. I shot the two games Friday without incident and Mark even gave me a battery charger so that I could use the gear for my shoots Saturday. I absolutely loved the camera. So many features that I wish I had on my N’s; retouching in camera, dual cf slots, bigger and more accurate screen and viewfinder, full frame, and the most important…the noise. You can crank that sucker to 3200 and the noise looks like my 800 ASA. The image above was taken with the D3 and the 14-24mm lens at Libby’s rollerskating birthday party at Funtime Skating Rink in Clear Lake City, Texas. Our friend Kevin was trying to catch a cupcake in his mouth and failed. Good fun.

Last night was my first time to shoot basketball. That sounds weird. I cannot believe that I had never shot basketball until last night. Although basketball is not one of my favorite sports, shooting it is pretty darn exciting. I was scheduled to shoot a prep football playoff and was elated to find out I was switching to an arena with lighting instead of a very dark high school football stadium. Since I don’t have much experience with arena strobes and my basketball shooting experience being where it was, I decided to head out to the base early, which proved to be a very good idea. It was the first game of the 2007 season for the US Air Force Academy Falcons and they faced off against the Big Green of Dartmouth. The venue was Clune Arena on the base of the Academy and as soon as I arrived I headed up to the catwalk to turn on the paper’s strobes. (4 Elichrom 1000r’s) After my initial (frightening) walk through, I checked the lines and much to my dismay found that the drop line to attach the pocket wizards to the strobes wasn’t working properly. After checking the lines and connections over and over I finally dropped into one of the strobes and managed to get half of the court’s lights operational. I would have to deal with that. Prior to the start of the game, the AFA photographer and I realized that we were crossing channels which was very odd since he was using a digital frequency and I was on analog. In the end, I was forced to shoot with the south-end lights on only leaving the back court completely black. It wasn’t an ideal situation, however it simplified some of the images. At some points, since the other photographer and I were sharing one of the strobes, if he had fired before me, I would only have one light operational as the shared strobe would be recycling. Needless to say there was a motley crue of images; some available light, some lit with one strobe, some lit with two. It was actually a lot more exciting than I would have thought, given the proximity to action. I did shoot from the catwalk for a bit, but with the sketchy lighting, it was better from the floor. I’m kind of bummed that I’m just now getting to shoot basketball, but I’m glad that its the NCAA. I hope to shoot a lot more soon.