Photo Story: Buzzketball December Tune-Ups

Buzzketball had two home basketball games in December — Radford (95-68) and Maryland Eastern Shore (93-40) — before this weekend's big game against Kentucky. Both games were blowouts, and Virginia Tech scored a combined 188 points.

Blowouts usually make for boring photos, so I caught myself wandering a bit from the boilerplate sports photos as the story in both games were wrapped up fairly quickly. If you want to go in order, you can see the photos from the Radford game here, and UMES game here, but in this recap, I'll be focusing on themes instead of a linear story.

First off, the freshman, Nickeil Alexander-Walker. He is very quickly becoming one of my favorite players to photograph, not just because he's extremely talented, but because his face score is off the charts. A good face will always make the sports photo that much better.

Next up, the wides. Basketball is such a fast sport down low that you usually don't have time to quickly switch from a telephoto primary camera to a wide secondary camera in the middle of a play. This means you need to make a conscious decision to switch to shooting wide for a couple minutes here and there and forego any plays that happen further down the court.

Here we see Justin Bibbs elevating for a quick shot after the inbounds pass. Inbounds passes underneath the basket are almost always an automatic switch to wide moment for me. Everyone is forced to face you and jockey for position, which usually makes for a good combination of face + ball + moment.

Something a little different, the dutch angle! (Or what happens when a level crop cuts off feet...) I particularly like this shot because I really like the architecture in the distant ceiling in Cassell. The giant beams stretching across the giant space give an old-school feel to the place that newer and flashier arenas don't really have.

Wide angles also help frame some of the action more than a telephoto can up close. Tyrie Jackson got a little too into it following a hard foul on his shot attempt, earning him a technical, but not before both Kerry Blackshear Jr.
and Nickeil Alexander-Walker tried to stop him.

Three-quarters of the way through the Radford game, with the Hokies well in control, things got really weird creative. I figured out that one of my cameras has a built in double-exposure mode, just like a film camera would have back in the day. I have never shot a double exposure in my life, so there was a bit of a learning curve on it, but a black and white conversion on a shot of the High Techs make everything look cooler.

As I was going through these galleries, I noticed that I got a couple shots of Virginia Tech players having some really fast hands all throughout. Here we have Justin Robinson and Chris Clarke both using their spidey-senses and avoiding the quick steam from behind.

And finally, I'm going to end of a bit of a sillier note. Faces, faces, faces.

(Get it? Basketball-face? I crack myself up.)

Enjoy!