“Just going for the ball, I swear!”
“Well, you got’em both. Now get off me!”
(Click any image to enlarge and sharpen.)

Yesterday’s post was nearly 2,000 words, so now I bring you pictures, which I’ve heard are worth 1,000 each (but take a lot less of your time).

These are just a few samples of the rainy adventure I wrote about in the previous post. Although the rain obscured a lot of the fine detail, these provide a pretty good representation of the events I described. Unlike most pics I post here, almost all were cropped at least a little (newspapers do it all the time)*.

So, with a dash of irreverence, here’s Arkansas-Auburn 1999.

“Dude, I’m never giving you a frikkin’ zerbert! Cut it out!”

It was so dark from the storm that my “slow” lenses didn’t allow a very high shutter speed. So, any time I slapped on the long lens (most of the time at a football game), the pics were subject to major camera shake blur. Or just plain subject motion blur.

“Whoa, Dad, the only black people here besides us are on the field, and that one creepy dude a few rows back with the white hood.”
“Son, just wave like this, root for the home team, and pray Arkansas has come a long way since Central High.”

For even the most competitive chess match, my equipment would have been fine. Barring something going horribly wrong, there’s not a lot of quick motion there, unless we’re talking speed chess. They punch that clock faster than Courtney shot Kurt.

“Yes I’ve heard, ‘Hey, your heads are getting wet,’ before. Now, can you shut up and see if I got that piece of spinach?”

Not to turn this into a “how-to” or anything, but those huge lenses the sports photographers use are so big because they gather lots of light, and allow high shutter speeds under more challenging conditions.

Did you catch how I hid that excuse behind the thin veil of a tutorial?

Seriously, though, a lens like that costs about $4,500 American brand new, if you just get the 300mm version (think 10x zoom in the point-and-shoot world). If you grab a 600mm, it’s more than $8,000. These are the lenses that make those Sports Illustrated pictures look so good, with the background so completely blurred (remember my Depth of Field How-To?).

I’m up for donations if anybody wants to hit my PayPal account. ;-)

He thinks: These people aren’t saying, “Whooo, pig sooieee!” Darn it!
She thinks: Why does he have to be gay? Dammit!

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes! Go Hogs! Beat Auburn! Just like last year when the Tigers were ranked #2 in the country and started our 10-game win streak.

And, we’re hosting an adults-only Halloween party Saturday evening. Report will follow here after I’ve had time to put those skinny black rectangles over innocent bystanders’ eyes and privates.

Update: ESPN.COM has a great story about an Arkansas player and his very proud family (they live about 30 miles from where I was born and reared).

* All photos taken with a 35mm Nikon N8008S and a variety of mid-tier Nikon lenses. Scanned in using an HP PhotoSmart S20 film scanner at 2100 DPI.