We’ve seen Joel photograph basketball and football before. He’s covering the team plays at COP.
Photographing sports is difficult, even more so then than now. It takes a lot of practice and there was no instant feedback. The photographer had to wait till development time to gauge the quality of his or her images.
Photographing at night was even more challenging as one can see. Flash is required as the film was relatively insensitive compared to today’s norms. And the flash bulbs only reach so far.
Daytime photography has a lot more latitude, as we can see from the images below. More interesting. One thing is clear, shutter speeds on these old cameras are never fast enough to fully freeze the motion. It’s an art.
The above negative is a copy from the original. So Joel must have submitted a few for the art department at COP. We’ve now seen the practice of copying negatives a few times.
Basketball is equally challenging to photograph as it is on a small court with the ball switching sides in fractions of a second.
Joel gets his best basketball shots by waiting for the ball to go into the hoop. It still requires good timing !
For the last two shots, Joel changed location to create a different vantage point. Good call to create variety.
That’s it for today. I do believe it is important to show these images, there is definitely progress in approaching the subject.
There’s more to talk about in the next blog post. Track sports and a few interesting non-sequitur shots.
Cheers !
Finding Joel Pahl Dardis 