Friday.

Pic of the day 38/365
Friday night for a small town photojournalist can mean being stuck in a high school gymnasium, much like tonight. Basketball season is seemingly never ending and with 2-3 games a week between high schools and the college. Many times it is the same shot over and over each week. You gotta amuse yourself some how.

I am in a tough situation that limits my ability to bring a little more creativity to the shots. In my position I must provide my own equipment. I currently only have one camera body. Shooting sports means I am stuck with one lens since I can't be scrambling to change lenses every time the ball changes possession.
I could shoot one half with a wide lens then the second half with a long lens, just to have a greater variety of shots, but that would run me in to too much overtime on the clock.

Shooting high school games can be difficult due to poor lighting. I typically shot 1000 ISO 1/250th F2.8-4. Sometimes, I will use a fill flash from my 580EX II, which can lead to some ugly shadows in the background.
At the higher ISO you get noise and higher contrast, images start to suffer. In the first half of a game I typically have about 80-120 frames with about 6-10 keepers. It gets culled rather fast due to arms in the way, back/front focus, can't see someone's face and such.

I am my own biggest critic regarding the quality of the work I am producing. After about four months I am realizing that I can go below my standard of quality (far below) and it will go unnoticed. I could be doing much more and producing much better work. But, I am getting dragged down with apathy from my environment. I attempt to make things look better and spend 5min on something rather than 30seconds. I believe it is a lack of knowledge for the potential that is available. But then again this is a paper that puts an advertisement on the from page. Never seen a news company put ads before news.

In jobs I didn't care about in the past (ones that were just a paycheck) I would just fly below the radar and only do just enough to keep from being fussed at.

Now that I am in a career I wanna be in I only have myself to combat with my work ethic. I get dragged down a bit and rely on myself and what the future holds to tilt my head up again and take another step.