Friday Night Lights

On the evening of Friday, September 3, I attended my first ever, and I do mean ever, high school football game. Sports in general never really interested me as a high-schooler. I had also always thought of  the games as just another excuse for the popular kids, of which I never really was one, to coagulate into their predefined cliches. Of course, looking back at my time in high school now, I had no way of knowing if that actually took place, seeing as how I never attended one.

Last night changed all that.

As part of my new job at The Northern Light, I had been tasked with taking pictures at Blaine's football games while a freelancer with whom the paper had worked before wrote about them. In addition to the game being my first, the evening also represented my first experience with taking photos where that was my sole responsibility; as opposed to shooting something and also being expected to write about it. I was also more than a little excited to use my newly laminated press pass for the first time.

The evening could not have been a better one for shooting a game. The sky was absolutely clear and turned nearly all the colors in the visible spectrum as the earth rotated to reside deeper and deeper in its own shadow. Mount Baker stood like an immense referee in the far off distance. The smell of hastily made popcorn hung in the air and mingled with the sounds of myriad high-schoolers gossiping (at least my teenage impressions of high school football games were partially right).

During the week before the game, I had asked a photojournalist friend of mine who graduated from Western a quarter before me for some pointers on shooting sports. All her advice, high shutter speed, wide-open aperture, rushed through my head as I took test shots of the game to make sure the settings on my borrowed Nikon D50 were right. I knew, of course, that they would have to be continually adjusted as the natural light waned and the towering floodlights bathed the field in a synthetic glow.

Then the high school band struck up the school's fight song, and a crash of stampeding football players uniformed in black and orange, Blaine's colors, surged onto the field. Introductions for both teams commenced and ended. The game was about to begin.

Once the game started, my friend's advice kicked in once again and informed me on where to stand to get the best shot; that, and a little bit of following the lead of the four other photographers who were there. I eventually learned who among Blaine's team got the chance to touch the ball the most. As the  night wore on, the most stressful bit was continually tweaking the camera's setting to cope with the hellishly lighted time of twilight. I unfortunately had to sacrifice a quick shutter speed, and being able to stop the fastest action, for properly exposed shots.

I finally understood how tough of a job shooting sports can be. Not only do you have to be aware of most everything going on around you, your camera has to be constantly adjusted to fit any changes in light conditions. All this while hustling up and down the field in order to find the best shot.

Overall, the experience was an incredibly positive one for me. I think I came away with some pretty decent shots, at least for my first time. Future games will hopefully only improve my skills.

Besides the experience of shooting sports for the first time, something else hit me that night: the realization of how much I had missed out on during my high school days by not going to football games. A brief conversation with an employee of the school district I had met in the first few weeks of my time at The Northern Light really stuck with me. He made the comment that this is what Friday nights are like in small-town America. I regret never having experienced it in my hometown of Las Vegas, but I am more than excited to be a part of the experience in my adoptive northwestern Washington home.