"Denver Nuggets guard J.R. Smith (1) is fouled by New Orleans Hornets guard Rasual Butler (45) while trying to make an acrobatic shot in the second quarter at Pepsi Center in Denver, Saturday, Jan. 3, 2009. Smith contributed 17 points in the 105-100 victory."
JUSTIN EDMONDS, THE GAZETTE
Tonight I shot the Nuggets game as my last assignment for The Gazette. It was my first NBA game so I was looking forward to shooting the up-tempo pace that is professional basketball. I've shot the other big three (NFL, NHL and MLB) so to me it was just another basketball game, only faster.
For the first time in a while I didn't have the opportunity to shoot on strobes and it showed because I shot A TON of images. Usually I'll shoot around 250ish images on strobes and tonight I easily tripled that number. I'm still trying to make "the" image on the first frame (or two) so the only difference is that I have to spend a lot more time editing than I would like. For whatever reason tonight I decided to shoot RAW which added a whole other monster to my workflow. It doesn't take me any longer to process the images but it does take forever to ingest 4GB of RAW files at once.
Now on to the good part....the part I'm sure I'll never forget.
In the first quarter Carmello decided to do his best Nolan Ryan inpersonation and throw a rocket of an alley-oop (sp?) pass to Kenyon. He couldn't handle it and it sailed right through his hands. Now I didn't see any of this until after the fact because I had my eye up to the camera shooting the whole time. I did realize what happened when the ball hit me. Let me rephrase that...I GOT ROCKED. Even at 1/640th of a second it shook my camera violently as shown in this image.
The ball hit me square in the face and broke my pocket wizard off of the hot shoe of my camera. Thankfully it only broke the foot which is an easy fix. The Pepsi Center staff even came over to make sure I was ok. The ball was definitely coming really hard but when you're not expecting it it's even worse. Here is what my low angle remote in front of me captured just before I got hit.
The Nuggets Dancers were sitting right behind me and thanked me for blocking the shot from hitting them. The next thing out of their mouthes was "Oh my god, is your camera like broken?" Thankfully my 1D Mark II is built like a tank so it was fine but I'll be calling LPA Designs, who make the pocket wizard, to order a new shoe for my Multi Max. Actually the guys over at Pocket Wizard have been checking out my stuff and have been impressed enough to offer to feature me on their blog in the near future. So hey guys, if you're reading this do you think you could send me a new foot, pleaseeeee?
-JCE
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