Athletes

I recently shot a few of the portraits for the newspaper’s fall season area athletes of the year. Central A&M’s Evan Hayes (pictured above) was the football player of the year, LSA’s Morganne Criswell was the area volleyball player of the year and Mt. Zion’s Joe Fritzche was the boys cross country runner of the year. Apparently if you want to be named one of the best athletes in the area you have to A) be good at what you do and B) go to a school where red is one of the school colors.

I get really excited when I see newspapers use a theme for their whole series of athlete portraits. See posts from Beck Diefenbach (Daily Chronicle) on his blog here, here and here. Melissa Lyttle (St. Petersburg Times) just updated her blog with a recent shoot. I know I have several more examples bookmarked but I am not in the mood for searching right now.

I have a hunch there’s a little more planning and communication that goes into something like that than what we currently have here. Hopefully I can push for that next season and we can come up with something neat for the kids and for our readers.

Portraits are not my strong suit… but I’ve been trying to study more sources of inspiration and get into them a little more. Would I rather go shoot a game? Yep. But I also have to feed the daily beast and portraits are a part of that. Anyone else have any sources of inspiration?

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.