One Game at a Time

I shot the Competitive Cheer contest Maryland hosted on the weekend of February 6th. The venue was Comcast Center so I was extremely familiar with the lighting and the environment. I showed up plenty early to catch both sport and non-sport (is that the right term?) squads cheer.

Greg walked me up into the rafters while he powered on his strobes. I got a chance to scope out some spots for future remotes. Greg has mounted a remote up in the rafters that looks right down on the basket on the visiting team's side of the arena. I would love the chance one day to put remotes up in the rafters but I know that's a long ways away. None-the-less, it's always exciting to walk around in the rafters of an arena and contemplate what future shots you could capture.

There were 9 collegiate level squads that competed tonight and I used the folder feature on my camera to keep things straight. Each time a new squad came out I upped the folder number so that I could easily import the photos into Lightroom and keep them separated. I like to caption all of my shots with the team and location so that I can easily search them later. Importing all the shots from one folder and then splitting them out later seemed a lot more difficult than making different directories for each team before I shot.

Shooting competitive cheer is difficult. I've only shot 1 other competition so it was beneficial to hit this event and see what I can do. I did a little better than my last time out but I still struggled. I don't know what the "good" shot looks like for competitive cheer. Is it a wide angle shot of the whole group, or is it a tight shot of an individual cheerleader smiling and pumping her fist?

I'm glad I shot the event and got some more exposure to this sport. It always helps to expand your horizons and learn something new...