I keep coming back to this photo. It’s a Hero Shot, no doubt.
But it is irreparable. A really good shot of a really good shot, ruined.
I have taken all kinds of photos where the forgiving depth of the RAW file combined with the ever evolving tools of Lightroom have allowed me to pull a usable image from the burning wreckage of an underexposed image shot at an astronomical ISO. But in this case there is no getting the ball, or the shooter’s hand, back in the frame.
I just blew it.
The bitterness of my despair is compounded by the realization—every time I look at the photo—that the only thing needed to have done to fix it was to turn the camera 90.° That’s right, turn the camera the long way and I am good. Cover of Sports Illustrated (or a couple dozen Instagram likes anyway).
The basket counted. It was part of a great comeback run by the team in white, the home town Brunswick Dragons. The team in green, from Oxford Hills, ended the season as the AA State champion and had built what seemed like a comfortable double digit lead until this fourth quarter run. The women in green, defending this drive, are Sierra Carson, a finalist for the Maine Ms. Maine Basketball, and her teammate, a Maine McDonald’s All-State Player, Molly Corbett. The woman going to the hoop like Bob Cousy is Brunswick’s Kelsie Carlton who has been ripping down her own fair share of post season accolades.
So it has the makings of a great story too—Bird slicing through Magic and Kareem. Like Bird, Carlton took her free throws right handed but showed no hesitance to go to the left hand when needed.
But I blew it. I cut off her left hand
In my defense, I had never shot basketball before; the playing surface is small compared to other sports I shoot. There is not a lot of time to predict next moves. To top it off I’ve never played basketball—I’ve got no forty year old muscle memory or instinct to tell me what happens next.
Still, I cut off the shooter’s hand, the ball, and the hoop. That is unforgivable.
My team had been down by double digits and entered the fourth quarter down by eight. With this drive they were in the midst of ten point run that would bring them to within a point.
Maybe I let my inner fan get the better of me and just blindly hammered the shutter release.
And I was just too close to the action. It’s a high school gym in Maine after all. Probably no more than ten feet separate the baseline from the wall my spine was pressed against. With my 70-200 lens opened up to 70 in order to get as wide a field of view as possible, I just could not get anything more in the frame.
Unless, I had turned the camera 90.°
This wasn’t exactly David versus Goliath because the Brunswick Girls were very good too. While Oxford Hills was running the table in Class AA North, Brunswick was powering its way through Class A South and headed for its own State Title game, but the Dragons were the underdogs. Oxford Hills is a bigger school in the biggest classification and has a string of State Championships to its credit.
And then there were the teeth on the floor.
Late in the first half, Carlton, the woman driving to the hoop, a team leader, got dumped to the floor, face first. You could hear the thud, and the recoil was excruciating, the exemplar of a face plant. As the visiting team made way and the staff did their thing, you could see them looking around the floor to retrieve something small. A contact lens, I assumed as something was handed to the Carlton’’s mother. As the injured player was guided to the locker room by the trainer, her shirt bloodied, a big wad of gauze pressed above her eye, it was plain there had been teeth on the floor. “That’s it” everyone figured, Brunswick is done for the day.
But she was back in the second half, cleaned up and bandaged, like Kirk Gibson stepping into the batter’s box against The Eck in the 1988 World Series. So it really would have been a hero shot.
And I missed the shot……that shot along with a couple more
I did manage to get a handful of other good photos from this game, and during the team’s run through the regional championships along with a bittersweet collection from their runner-up finish in the State Title game.