
This past weekend I headed back to my home in Kent, Ohio to take a couple days off from school. While I was around, I spent some time shooting our softball and baseball teams as they played at the University of Akron.

This past weekend I headed back to my home in Kent, Ohio to take a couple days off from school. While I was around, I spent some time shooting our softball and baseball teams as they played at the University of Akron.

A couple weeks ago I got a call from my friend Jared to cover the Pittsburgh Marathon this weekend. I had a great time making images that will be used by the organization for marketing and other promotional use.

Hot on the heels of returning from the Peter Read Miller Workshop, I headed out to California last week for the Sports Shooter Academy, a workshop in Orange County put on by Robert Hanashiro of USA Today and freelance photographer Matt Brown.

As I wrap up my time at Ohio University, I’ve spent a good portion of the school year training and mentoring a new group of photographers at the athletic department. Recently, our team completed its first project of the football season, the poster for the spring game.
After a week of coordinating schedules between nine student athletes, facilities management, and the football staff, we decided on a 9pm shoot at Peden Stadium.
The following post was written for Western Digital as part of the WD Creative Masters contest.

Just as we reached the point of total exhaustion, it was time to call it a week. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I learned so much in such a short amount of time at the Peter Read Miller Workshop.
The best part of the experience for me was working with an incredible group of instructors, assistants, and students that all share a common love for sports photography. It was great to see how the lectures and lessons in the field helped us grow leaps and bounds as a class in just a week; the difference between our images on the first and last days of the workshop was stunning. As we worked past technical hurdles, you could see how our work started to focus on specific moments, whether it was peak action of quiet dejection.
In the end, my favorite image from the workshop was from our lighting session at Denver East High School. Shooting hand held from above the hoop was a new experience for me, as was learning about arena lighting. I hope the new perspectives I gained from my time in Denver can help me grow to be an even better sports photographer.
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the support of the staff at Western Digital. From the moment I got the call that I was the winner of the contest, I knew I was in good hands. I cannot thank them enough for their efforts in helping me learn from this one of a kind experience.