Dashed

I feel like I have been in a bit of a slump photography wise lately. I was mining for some deep advice from a veteran shooter at work the other day, a photographer who is known all over Salt Lake and I asked him whether he ever felt like I was feeling. He took off his glasses and looked up from his laptop and I was waiting for pure intelligence and wisdom to flow from his mouth into my brain, I even thought for a brief second that I could feel us bonding over this probably common situation among photographers, the music was starting to cue up in my brain like at the crescendo of cheesy family sitcoms like Full House or Family Matters where everything is magically solved by a heart to heart convo at roughly 28.5 minutes into the half hour program, "No, not really" he said. Hm, what do you say to that? I laughed thinking he was just messing with me and quickly realized I was laughing alone. Well luckily I kept digging and went to lunch the next day with another photog who is rarely short on words, mindless chatter or otherwise. He talked to me about sacrifice. Not like giving up your family and life to be a good photographer, rather sacrifice getting a better photo than the perhaps average one in the bag and stretching yourself to get something leaps and bounds beyond the first image. "Sometimes it will work out, sometimes it won't at all but you can't get stuck." So the other day I was shooting baseball, a harder sport to shoot than many realize and after I had a couple average cliche` sliding dust cloud shots at second base (that in actuality were "almosts") I looked at the distance between the ground and the home teams dugout. I figured I could probably get up there and it was hard to peel away the cautious and at times lazy layers that are probably holding me back as a photographer. I decided to try it out and at the bottom of the 7th inning Orem high started their comeback. They were only two down and had a runner on first and a lightning fast pinch-runner on second with only one out. A few really good hits had put them in excellent position to at least force the game into extra innings. Batter comes up to the plate and hits a dinger to the outfield , far back enough that the pinch-runner tags up and go's for it as soon as the pop-fly is caught (2nd Out) Orems hopes and all the fans are screaming as the long ball comes to home in just enough time for the catcher to hunker down over the plate and feed the mitt draped ball into the runner 's stomach as they crash into eachother. When the dust settles, the catcher...well you can figure out the rest. In this case, although it is not a totally spectacular photo it is different and really showed the vibe of the last inning from a new angle for me at least. Some times missing out on the same old stuff is worth getting out of your comfort zone. From now on the dugout with the sun on the backside will look more tempting than before.