State soccer wrap-up

Ten games, 135 photos submitted out of 9,270 taken. Not bad for three days' work. The boys' state soccer tournament is one of my favorite events to cover, but I'll admit I was worried about finding fresh images on my third time covering the event. Mother Nature helped me out a little, though, and sent some rain to Des Moines for the first day. Nothing like covering six games in a miserable drizzle to keep you on your toes. I brought a tent this time around to protect our media work table, which is otherwise exposed to the elements and obviously problematic for working on a laptop. This year saw plenty of collisions, leaping and overtime, so it was hard to narrow things down to these few favorites... to see more, head back to the Photos and Videos homepage and scroll through our galleries at the lower left.

Day one: West Liberty advanced to the semifinals, while consistent favorite Cedar Rapids Xavier lost in an overtime shootout.

A killer header was more effective cropped, so I'm showing you both versions. Despite 8 frames per second, this is a surprisingly difficult image to make, and I had no idea this had even happened until I was editing later. (For the millisecond that the ball made contact, the shutter was down, so I didn't even see it happen. As a general rule in fast-moving sports like soccer, if I actually see something happen through the viewfinder, it's probably already a missed moment. And unlike other, slower sports with plenty of breaks in play -- football, basketball, baseball -- I prefer not to edit in-camera during the game.)

Day two was sunny and warm, but West Liberty and another area favorite, Iowa City Regina, lost in the semifinals. Dejection can be more difficult to convey in a photo, so the context of the winning team helped provide some contrasting emotion.

Iowa City West won their semifinal in a pretty physical game with some great reaction. Of course, players don't always react toward my corner, but I liked the mirrored body language between player and ref in the third image.

By day three, most of the action is beginning to look the same, so I'm excited by anything out of the ordinary. To keep things interesting, I shoot backlit, against the sun instead of with it. Of course, the tent had blown away overnight, so I was editing at sunset, resulting in some.. interesting.. color cast. The theme of the game: heads between legs. Secondary theme: wonky exposure after forgetting I had been exposing for backlighting when I ran to catch up with the team. Lessons for next year: sandbags to hold down the tent, and aperture priority for the last two minutes of the game.