Back to Photography and other Hobbies

Since I haven’t quite figured out how to get captions to show under my pictures, I will place one here for the shot on today’s post. Two Nikon D200s, one significantly younger than the other, and a 600 lens are my Florida arsenal. The picture was taken with my Pixel 7 Pro phone which has a pretty darned good camera in its own right.

I want to shoot a pelican…a couple of dolphins and maybe a manatee or two. Not with a gun, but with my camera.

As I find myself with more free time to fill…a hopefully brief hiatus before resuming my golf game…I have “gotten back into” photography, model building and writing. I dabbled once in a while with photography following my retirement as I had a personal Nikon and three or four lenses to go with it, but having acquired a second Nikon, I plan to do a little more than I have in the first eight years of my retirement. I used to build models when I was younger and resumed that hobby on a couple of holiday breaks at SLU several years ago. I have a couple of metal ship kits and am going to build models of four of my former cars…the 1967 and 1971 Camaros, and the 1990-ish Toyota Celica and the 2001 PT Cruiser I bought with the money I saved from quitting smoking.

The urge to write again after eight years of Facebook posts or the occasional long email has resulted in this web site. I am also doing a history of St. Lawrence hockey for Isaac Beckstead and the SLU Hockey Record Book which is going to make a return to accessibility in the near future. That history will also be posted on this web site over the next few weeks. All of the posts on the web site are intended to entertain and amuse, and I hope to develop a following of family, friends and SLU folk. I also hope to add a gallery or two to the site…I am learning as I go, something I did with many of the software programs which became essentials in the life of a sports information director.

My background in photography started when I joined the staff of the St. Albans Messenger. While we had a staff photographer…Gene LaFountain…reporters were encouraged to take their own pictures, particularly in sports. The Messenger had three cameras in its camera pool in the mid-60s and they were available for staff use on a first-come basis. A Speed Graphics with a film pack for multiple exposures, a Hasselblad, again a 120mm film camera and a Minolta 35mm with a standard lens. The Speed Graphics, a bellows-type camera, did not really lend itself to sports photography. It was great for static stuff…portraits, accident scenes, posed pictures, etc., but it didn’t offer enough film capacity to shoot a sporting event, and the action had to be pretty close to the photographer for a usable shot. I did get a few good football pictures with it when a sweep came in my direction, but I nearly got creamed by the players heading out of bounds as well. The Hasselblad 500 was a great camera and had a zoom capacity which worked well in sports A top viewer camera, it was easy to focus, but it too used 120 film which limited your exposures to 12. The Minolta was a perfect sports camera as its 35mm film allowed up to 36 exposures.

When I moved on to the Free Press, reporters were again asked to shoot as well as write. We had access to three or four cameras, all 35mm, and with some different telephoto lenses. At least two of the cameras were Nikons, which has become my go-to brand, and again we had a first-come policy about which ones we could use. Don Fillion as sports editor usually got first choice and I, as assistant sports editor got the second choice. But, if someone was covering an event which would dictate the use of a 200 or 300mm lens, that would dictate who got what. I continued my sports photography when I moved to St. Lawrence as sports information director. Again, there were a couple of pool cameras for various uses, and all were 35mm.

When I started with the Messenger, Geno LaFountain taught me how to process my own film and make prints. All the way through my newspaper career and into the new venture in sports information, the pictures were black and white because that was what we used in the papers and for publications. I did dabble with color slides and color prints on occasion, but the processing part was a little more than I wanted to tackle. We did hire some outside photographers to help cover events and shoot team pictures and the like. Wayne White and Carol Reichart were the two go-to people during my career and Carol developed and printed a number of rolls of color pictures for me before the beginning of the digital era. We also got some great photos from a couple of student photographers, Eric Williams and Carol Hill. Both had great talent with a camera and came through with some terrific shots for our media guides and other uses. Carol has returned to the North Country and is providing the sports information office with tons of great shots for the athletics web page and other uses. The “greatest invention since sliced bread” was when photography went digital, taking away the long darkroom hours, but probably adding them on Photoshop or a similar photo editing platform.

St. Lawrence did have a full-time staff photographer, and the last one I worked with, Tara Freeman was very talented and easy to work with. The powers-that-be wanted extensive use of Tara’s work, almost to the point of exclusivity, and while I tried to accommodate as SID, we still needed our own photography to feed the graphics-driven monster which is a college athletic web site. Tara couldn’t be at every game, certainly shouldn’t be expected to cover road games, and could devote only a certain portion of her busy schedule to sports photography. I insisted on relevancy when it came to the men’s and women’s hockey pages and while Tara frequently met that need, she couldn’t do it all of the time, which is why I sometimes used my own shots to illustrate a game story. It was also impossible for her to take a day and spend it at a track meet or a horse show where I could, so I spent a lot of time shooting those sports. Tara was recently named Assistant Vice President for University Communications…a well-deserved promotion!

At one time or another I took pictures of every St. Lawrence sport that was competing while I was sports information director…34 of them at the time I retired. I have also shot weddings as a wedding present, promotion photos of apartments and apartment complexes and various and sundry critters around where ever I was living. The real pro photographer in the family is my niece Joie Hatin. Joie who has a full-time job with Homeland Security, has a sideline as a photographer and has the skill and imagination to capture almost anything on with a camera. She does weddings, senior portraits and pictures of minor hockey teams and individuals and they are all extremely well done. Joie and her husband Chris have three kids, Colton, Addi and Hadley and they have been frequent subjects of her photography and pop up on Facebook from time to time. They are also displayed on the wall of their grandparents’ house. So, if you are reading this and looking for a pro to shoot an event or some portraits, call her, not me.

The only sport we really had trouble getting good photos of was skiing. I attended several St. Lawrence Winter Carnival events, first at the SLU Snow Bowl and then at Lake Placid and got some workable shots of both alpine and Nordic competition. But we basically had one shot a year at getting our ski stuff and if a big hockey game or other event the same weekend came along, we were in trouble. Fortunately, the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association of which St. Lawrence is a charter member, started offering the use of photos taken by a staff intern or full-time photographer at weekend carnivals. We also hired some outside photographers such as Nancie Battaglia in Lake Placid who came through with just the material we were looking for.

The secret to good sports photography is in knowing the game. If you can anticipate a pass play and are in the right position in football, you can get a picture of a great catch. A telephoto shot through the backstop of the pitcher in baseball and softball is always a dynamic image as is the blast out of a sand trap in golf. At one time when I was with the Free Press, Ted Ryan and I were covering the Vermont Amateur, and both were poised on the edge of a sand trap after one of the leaders had plopped one onto the beach. He came up and saw us and said, “look at you two vultures…you probably kicked my ball into the trap!” We both got good shots of what was an excellent sand shot, and both the Free Press and Rutland Herald had nearly identical pictures illustrating that day’s story. Another part of getting a great sports picture is simply “bullshit luck”. A couple of my greatest hits while in the newspaper business were a shot of Essex Junction catcher Jerry Green tagging an opposing runner on the butt while the runner was draped over Jerry’s shoulder and stretching for the plate with his hand hovering inches away. Another was a shot at Catamount Stadium with a multi-car pileup and a driver walking toward the infield through the mayhem. I didn’t even know he was there until I developed the film.

I made the front page of the Free Press with a couple of pictures over the years, but the one I liked best was an early morning picture of a moored sailboat with a light fog on Lake Champlain. I had stayed overnight at a girl friends camp on the lake and was up and about early to head to Middlebury to cover a Middlebury College football game. I looked at the scene, ran to my car and grabbed the camera and there it was, the front page shot. Unfortunately, during my newspaper career, I also shot some accident scenes and trekked the top of Jay Peak for a small plane crash. I ended up helping three other volunteers carry the bodies of the victims to the top of the lift line after the authorities on hand released the bodies from the scene. I also got a picture of a Corvette in a tree with the unhurt, but very inebriated driver still in it.

I now have two Nikons and a bunch of telephoto lenses. My old D200 was acting up and suddenly quit altogether, so I decided to invest in a new one. I found a great deal on Amazon and it came last week. In the meantime, I fussed around with the old D200 and could see what looked like an accumulation of dust or something on the battery connections. A Q-tip and a little rubbing alcohol fixed that, so I now have two available cameras with two different zoom capacities: 70-300 on the old one and 18-200 on the new one. Plus I have a mirror 600 lens which I used for getting good shots of the hammer, javelin and discus in track and field and now use for long-distance shots of most anything.

My plan is to try to get some shots of pelicans and boats and stuff off the front of Casa RB. I also plan to take a short cruise when the weather is promising to get more pictures of birds and add some dolphins and manatees to the list. I also have some pictures of flowers and a citrus plant that I plan to post when I get the gallery thing figured out on the web page. When I go back north in the spring and the weather is nice, I am going to try to shoot some high school sports…baseball, softball and track. I plan to get some USB sticks and give the coaches or athletic directors copies of all the pictures for use as they see fit. I am also hoping the weather will be nice and my treatment schedule will  a visit to Middlebury College for a track meet on April 19…St. Lawrence will be at the meet and I plan to provide both schools’ SIDs with copies of the good stuff.

The one thing with the sporting events is that I am going to invoke a modified “55 Rule”. The original 55 Rule was established by me to let coaches know when I would cover an outside event. If it wasn’t at least 55 degrees I either stayed in my office and got the scorebook later, or took refuge in the press box with just a brief visit to the sidelines for a few pictures. The modified part is that the degrees have been upped by a few. Mid-60s and I’ll be there, lower and I will stay in the comfort of my apartment.