From the back row

Ever since I became a student at the University of Washington in Tacoma, I've wanted to take advantage of the cheap student tickets to sporting events. The hoopla, team apparel, beer breath and voices hoarse from cheering and yelling do something to a person's psyche that's hard to explain.

As a photojournalist, I've been assigned to shoot many college basketball games and always enjoy bypassing crowds of people to take my front row seat on the court. This shooting position lends itself to nice, (mostly) unobstructed views of the action. It also happens to be known among fellow photojournalists as, "the best seat in the house." (You can see what I'm talking about below)

Today, I decided to marry my two interests and BUY a ($5) student ticket to a sold out UW-WSU season finale game and shoot the entire game from the position of my seat no matter where it ended up. As I walked into Hec Ed arena with ticket in hand, I started to realize my lot was not going to be so lucky. Yep - you guessed it, I had a ticket to "the worst seat in the house" in the very back row. (See photo below)
As I waited for the game to start, I contemplating giving up on my "self assignment" in favor of something better. I watched as other photographers took their customary seats on the floor and felt a twinge of envy creep upon me. Since I work for the UWT school paper, I could have just asked the SID for a pass. But then, the challenge and experience wouldn't be the same.

As I started playing around with my 300mm 2.8 lens and my Nikon D300, I realized I could probably pull a couple images out of the position after all. The elevation of my seat gave me more available light to work with and allowed me to shoot at 1000 iso at f2.8 at 1000th of a second.

The game started with all the gusto you'd expect for the final game of the year. After about five minutes, I found myself standing on my seat, leaning against the back wall of the arena with the 300mm and thousands of fans. Besides the near Coug/Husky brawl, the experience was everything I'd been expecting and more. The game was fantastic - of course, the Huskies won (and are Pac 10 champs). And I'm pretty happy with the images I got.

All but the last one, were made from my seat in the back row.