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Pictures I Like-Basketball Edition

Looking through our photo archive after the weekend, it was hard to find picture that wasn’t taken at a basketball game. Here’s a couple of pictures from the high school championship games that jumped out at me, but really, there isn’t room on the blog for all the pictures I thought were good. Check out the galleries to see more high school basketball.

-John Clanton

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Full-court Press

The Oklahoman’s photo staff is busy covering high school, college and professional basketball. Bryan Terry and Chris Landsberger are in Kansas City covering the Big 12 tournament, Nate Billings photographed the Thunder last night and Sarah Phipps, Steve Sisney and Nate will cover the state high school championships this weekend. Take a look at last night’s Bedlam game in Kansas City or a gallery of Nate’s pictures from the Thunder’s win over New Orleans.

-John Clanton

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Welcome to the Big House

Follow these links to galleries from the finals of the Oklahoma high school state basketball tournament:

Class A Boys, Class A Girls, Class B Boys, Class B Girls

“Congratulations! It is Championship Saturday and you have made it to the Big House,” 12-year announcer Steve Daniels proclaimed to a large audience at State Fair Arena.

The statement is as much a tradition as the Big House itself.

If you are fan of small-school Oklahoma high school basketball, then the Big House is your Mecca.

“I think at the first of the year it’s been ingrained in them now you want end up at the Big House … and they’ve heard that all their lives. This has now taken on the mythical proportion for some those kids,” said Daniels.

Karl Francel jumped up and down in his seat dressed in an American Indian head dress and covered in warpaint. He was one of the rowdy fans who run to their seats as soon as the doors open. They boo the referees and cheer on their teams.

“Man, the Big House is where it is at. It is so exciting to be here as a fan and it is where everyone dreams of getting to. It’s where a whole town can come out and support their boys. There is nothing like it in the world.”

Back at the announcers’ booth, Daniels plays an instrumental version of the state song.

The crowd sings in unison.

Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, Ev’ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk
Makin’ lazy circles in the sky.

“Congratulations! It is Championship Saturday and you have made it to the Big House,” Daniels proclaimed for the fourth time in the evening.

Oklahoma’s state basketball tournament has been held at the State Fairgrounds Arena since the 1960s.

“Every small school player, coach and fan wants to come here. It is just a tradition. Now we have players playing on the same court of the same arena their grandparents,” he said.

With a combined 68 Big House appearances, 8 teams battled it out Saturday night in their quest for the golden ball.

“I think the history of it is so much, also. If you like history. I grew up a big baseball fan and the places like Fenway Park and Yankee’s Stadium are the places you have always heard of. And in Oklahoma high school basketball – the Big House is on that level,” Daniels said.

-Sarah Phipps

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State basketball tournament

The state high school basketball tournament is one of the favorite events of our staff to cover. There is often a lot of negotiating among us to get to see who will get to cover the championship days because of the high potential for great pictures.

For a photographer, the reaction photos are the best thing about the state tournament. We get to see the athletes at their highest and lowest, often several times a day. Below are some of the reaction photos from the first two days of the tournament.

The finals for Class A and B are happening today at The Big House (aka State Fair Arena). We’ll post some shots from there when the action is finished.

For a gallery of all our photos from Thursday’s quarterfinals, click here.

Click here to see the semifinals from Friday.

-Nate Billings

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A New nDepth

Click here to see final slideshow about Perry wrestling.

Slideshows take awhile to edit, especially when the topic is fairly broad. Last week when I photographed wrestlers at Perry High School for an nDepth project, the story idea behind Matt Patterson’s  topic as he described it was “The History of Wrestling in Perry.”  At the end of last Wednesday, I had 1,114 images and 9 interviews saved on my memory cards. That’s a lot more than if the story had been a bit narrower, like this one for example. For that one I had one interview and less than a hundred pictures.

To edit down from 1,114 I thought about how the quotes would form the story. I listened to the interviews and got an idea of the direction the interviews would take me,  sorted through the images, and tagged the ones that I liked. That left me with 115 images. I sorted through those, looking for images that were redundant, picking out the ones that really helped move the story along. That third round of editing got me down to sixty images. After I got the sound edited and exported, I fit the sound and the pictures together, and did one last round of cutting pictures. The final slideshow about wrestlers in Perry features 34 photographs and parts of all 9 interviews. Take a look at the nDepth page too.

-John Clanton

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A Quick Preview

I’ve been editing pictures all morning. Last week I mentioned on our facebook account that I’d spent the day in Perry, Okla., photographing wrestlers for a story about the tradition and history of the sport in the small Oklahoma town.

I still have plenty of work to do, editing sound and putting together the slideshow, but here’s a quick preview of the project. Look for Matt Patterson’s story in the Sports section of Friday’s newspaper and check back here for links to the online story, pictures and slideshow.

-John Clanton

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From the All-Star Game

Staff Photographer Bryan Terry covered the NBA All-Star game in Dallas on Sunday. Here’s a couple of the pictures he sent in from Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, Texas.

To read more of The Oklahoman’s coverage of the All-Star game, click here.  Look for Oklahoman Photography Department on Facebook.

-John Clanton

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Pictures I like

I’ve been out of the office for five days. I had a three day weekend, then I had to call in sick for two days. When I got back in this afternoon, as usual, I searched through Merlin to see what our photographers had been taking pictures of.  The answer, apparently, is alot of basketball games.

-John Clanton

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Leaking Light

If you missed the Sports department’s High School All State Sports 2009 that was published earlier his week, you missed some interesting photographs by Staff Photographer Chris Landsberger. He used a small, plastic camera called a Diana Fplus to photograph high school athletes in the studio at The Oklahoman. Like a Holga, the Diana is made completely of plastic, and is not exactly light proof. The seams of the camera aren’t lightproof, so just a little bit of light gets in darkens the corners of the image.

Other than playing with Holga and Diana cameras for fun, The Oklahoman staff is completely digital. The equipment used to process film was donated to the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond around 1997. Landsberger took the film to be processed at Epperson Photo here in Oklahoma City, and then used a scanner to get the pictures into the computer and store them in the archives.

-John Clanton

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Back at work

My ten-day vacation just came to an end. When I got to work today I searched through our archive system called Merlin to see what the staff had been up to while I was gone. There were plenty of great shots but I narrowed it down to five of my favorites.

-John Clanton

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