Back in the day of high school, oh so long ago, I was best known for my sports photography. In fact, the very first image I sold was of the NY Islanders on display at a photography show in Roosevelt Field. We are talking the old Roosevelt Field in Garden City, not the new multi level shopping extravaganza it is now. As my kids have grown I always made excuses for not bringing my camera to their sporting events. Odd you would think for someone who loves sports photography. But the truth of the matter is that I get so involved emotionally when my kids take the field that focusing (no pun intended) on making great images is difficult for me.
This spring however, I decided that I would take out my 200-400 and photograph some of my middle son Peter’s lacrosse games at Taft given this was the end of his lacrosse career.

Peter is wearing #16 for Taft in the pictures above.

So how am I tying this into photography you might be asking? Well, my making excuses for not shooting put me in a position to try and force all my lacrosse photography into one season this spring. And wouldn’t you know it, every game I attended this spring had rain. Not drizzle or mist, but pouring down rain with winds blowing the stuff sideways. This made photographing the games literally impossible. So I was down to my last game the week before Peter graduated to make some images of him and his friends. Sure enough as Lee Ann and I drove to the game, the heavens opened up. Unfortunately, the rain didn’t stop until the 4th quarter. So here I was trying to force many years of pent up kid photography demand into 15 minutes, yikes! The real moral to the story is stop make excuses for not taking a camera with you at all times. Even camera phones now are able to capture great images (of things that don’t move ;-)) so we don’t have an excuse not to have a camera with us to memorialize all the great things that happen around us. I be you will be surprised at how you see the world differently once you start taking your camera everywhere you go!

Images captured with a Nikon D700 w/200-400 f/4 on Lexar digital film.