Our Stuff

Ingrid has been working on a project for school for the last few months and it is now finished! She spent hours looking for photos and documents to illustrate her project. She interviewed a local historian and the city forester. Read more old documents and maps doing her research than you can imagine. And, she made the video to prove that she did all that other stuff I said she did. I’m proud of her final product…and all the hard work. I hope you are too!

Enjoy!

Ever since I became a student at the University of Washington in Tacoma, I’ve wanted to take advantage of the cheap student tickets to sporting events. The hoopla, team apparel, beer breath and voices hoarse from cheering and yelling do something to a person’s psyche that’s hard to explain.

As a photojournalist, I’ve been assigned to shoot many college basketball games and always enjoy bypassing crowds of people to take my front row seat on the court. This shooting position lends itself to nice, (mostly) unobstructed views of the action. It also happens to be known among fellow photojournalists as, “the best seat in the house.” (You can see what I’m talking about below)

Today, I decided to marry my two interests and BUY a ($5) student ticket to a sold out UW-WSU season finale game and shoot the entire game from the position of my seat no matter where it ended up. As I walked into Hec Ed arena with ticket in hand, I started to realize my lot was not going to be so lucky. Yep – you guessed it, I had a ticket to “the worst seat in the house” in the very back row. (See photo below)
As I waited for the game to start, I contemplating giving up on my “self assignment” in favor of something better. I watched as other photographers took their customary seats on the floor and felt a twinge of envy creep upon me. Since I work for the UWT school paper, I could have just asked the SID for a pass. But then, the challenge and experience wouldn’t be the same.

As I started playing around with my 300mm 2.8 lens and my Nikon D300, I realized I could probably pull a couple images out of the position after all. The elevation of my seat gave me more available light to work with and allowed me to shoot at 1000 iso at f2.8 at 1000th of a second.

The game started with all the gusto you’d expect for the final game of the year. After about five minutes, I found myself standing on my seat, leaning against the back wall of the arena with the 300mm and thousands of fans. Besides the near Coug/Husky brawl, the experience was everything I’d been expecting and more. The game was fantastic – of course, the Huskies won. And I’m pretty happy with the images I got.

All but the last one, were made from my seat in the back row.

IB

Ingrid’s brothers Erik and Kurt along with Kurt’s friend Michael came to town this weekend for a visit. Not quite sure what kids these days like to do (LOL!), we handed them each a camera and headed down to The Nisqually Wildlife Refuge for a walk and to shoot some birds. We also celebrated my Mom’s birthday this weekend. There will be some pics from that soon, but for now, enjoy the birds. with the exception of the photos of Ingrid, we shot these pics. We will add some of the boy’s pics soon.