In Your Eye

Sometimes I surprise myself. Like when I can have a really striking photo and have no idea I have it.

I always tell people when it comes to photography, mostly SLR photography, that if you see the moment through the lens, then you missed it. Sit next to me at a basketball game and you'll hear me mutter a lot, even without checking the screen on the back of my camera "missed that one" or some such utterance sometimes not repeatable in polite company.

You see, with a Single Lens Reflex camera (that's the SLR) the mirror is up and you actually can't see what it is you're photographing at the instant you're actually snapping the photo. That instant is pretty brief and one usually has a pretty good idea what's there. But sometimes, you just don't.

The night of the Huskie's loss to Notre Dame in the NCAA Final Four last month I was on a very tight deadline. The game started after 9 p.m. Eastern time, the paper had to go to bed within minutes of the end of the game.

Once the buzzer sounded my priority was to edit my images and send the best of the reaction to the season-ending loss. So I was working almost exclusively at the end of my take, the last 100 frames or so, looking at the tears on the bench, the shell-shocked looks as the players left the floor amidst the celebratory Irish players.

Once that deadline was met though it was time to look for everything else. The best peak action plays, the storytelling moments from the rest of the game.

And still, I had not found this shot.

It was only when the photographer from Getty Images turned to me to ask if I could help identify a player in one of her photos that I even knew I should go back and look again. I knew the Getty photographer and I had been on the same end of the court for the game. I knew we already had a lot of similar shots because she kept asking for my help with ID's. (this is a common occurrence as I cover the team all-season and can recognize players by various individual traits when a jersey number is not visible).

Back to my take I went, and there it was, Bria Hartley and Becca Bruszewski and the green painted fingernails. My original frame is looser, shot vertically. But a quick crop and I transmitted it in time to make the online coverage of the game. And then it went in print in the day-after coverage.