The Globetrotters came to Ottawa last night and I was one of two fan photographers engaged local to the area. There are two photographers who travel with the troupe.
Karen sent me a link to an ad on Craigslist, of all places, for fan photographers for the Ottawa performance. I am always leery of Craigslist as I think of it as scam central, but it’s popular enough and after reading the ad it looked legit.
This was a week or two ago and since there was no reply, I got the dumpster for the weekend and had my plans set. Then, last Thursday, the woman who arranges these things called me and said that the Easter weekend had kind of impeded on her plans to arrange the Ottawa so I was still needed if I was available.
Of course I said yes. I love shooting under pressure and asking fans for permission sounded like a lot of pressure. It was :-)
Anyway, they asked if I knew someone and I asked Nick, but he was working at Quiznos all day. And they pay better about the same.
So I arraved 15 minutes ahead of the 5 o’clock meeting time and met a very young fellow named Grant, who is a Carleton journalism student. Turns out that there are no jobs for reporters any more who have only the one skill. You need photojournalism skills too (I knew this from my son’s friend Robbie) and so he brought his Canon 50d along. I had the D700 and the two fellows who toured with the troupe appeared to have small Canons with them.
I brought the Tamron 28-75 2.8 along and this lens proved to be excellent for this job. Sharp and fast so I could get away with ISO 1600 through 2500. WIth the full frame D700, there is little grain to speak of at these ISOs. Their suggestion was 400 ISO, but that creates images with the ”cave” look, and I’ve seen a few of those on the various show galleries.
I also brought the wonderful SB800 with the Lumiquest mini softbox that smooths flash shadows. I set my flash compensation to –.7 through –1 all night long in order to light faces well but not blow out the people. I shot TTL or TTLBL (balanced) all night as well and was very pleased overall.
I was asked to shoot green screen for the pregame period and after a while I had a lineup. I was that I needed to speed things up a bit as we were tearing things down, but I thought I’d been moving about as fast as the fans would go. Once the lineup formed, I was pounding them through pretty good. During half time, I did not get nearly as many, which was weird. But after the game, the other fellas set up green screens and pounded a lot of people through. I was asked to go under the rope and shoot people getting their balls signed.
Frankly, that job sucked. The players move around a lot and only fans who pay a premium can come across the rope and shoot with the players. So my job was to shoot the fans holding the ball being singed and then try to hand them a card. That sucked completely. After wasting about 10 minutes I went outside again and tried shooting fans who were waiting in line. That was not bad, but Grant later mentioned that he had a lot of success shooting fans who had just had their ball signed …. DOH! He’s got the knack …
So I await the results … they should be posted in a few hours at the glovetrotters fan photo web site, here:
Click on the above image to go to the fan site and select Ottawa. My galleries will be 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102 and 103. My initials are KDL and should be used to tag each of those galleries. At least, I hope that works out properly.
I have no images of my own … we were handed a compact flash card at the beginning and it was taken at the end. We were strictly forbissen to shoot the players or anyone else … the job was the fans. I adhered to the rules religiously, even though that hurt :-)
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