Baseball...

According to Tallulah Bankhead, "There have been only two geniuses in the world: Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare."  With deference to Mays, and apologies to Shakespeare, I will attempt to explain my love for the game of baseball.  There is nothing I would rather shoot,  Simply put, baseball has everything a photographer could possibly want.  Action, beauty, grace, simplicity, character and more.

I started shooting baseball in 1986 in Montreal, the home of the now defunct Montreal Expos, for the wires and The Montreal Gazette.  The Expos were a great team, at times, others, not as great.  The Olympic Stadium was, unfortunately, a terrible place to shoot baseball.  The biggest problem was that the retractable roof of the stadium wasn't.  To be fair, I think they may have successfully opened the roof once or twice before the roof shredded, due to design flaws, and was eventually replaced with a roof that didn't open.  As well, large cement chunks of the building would fall onto the field from time to time.  Not quite the same experience as shooting at Wrigley Field.

Follow the jump for photos, and more...

Shooting the Expos meant shooting Tri-X film pushed to 3200 ISO, processing in Accufine developer at 75 or 80 degrees, making an 8"X10" print, typing a caption on sticky paper, and transmitting for 7 minutes, all from a darkroom in the stadium.  The light was brutal.  The gear we used, not quite up to day's standards.  The standard gear was a manual focus 300mm F2.8 with a 1.4 X extender and a Nikon F3.  At the time, the best gear around, and undoubtedly better than what great baseball photographers of the past used to make many an iconic picture.  Despite it all, shooting the Expos is one of the best memories of my photography career in Montreal.  

Expos manager, Buck Rodgers and outfielder, Tim Raines.

More photos here

Baseball is meant to be played, and shot, outside.  Sometimes it rains, but most of the time, it doesn't.  Fortunately, Vancouver has one of the prettiest little ballparks, Nat Bailey Stadium, I have ever seen.  Home of The Vancouver Canadians.

Nat Bailey Stadium, Vancouver, B.C.

I also had the pleasure of shooting at another great ballpark, Centennial field, when it was the home of The Vermont Expos.  The level A, Minor league team of the Montreal Expos.

Centennial Field, Burlington, Vermont.

The essence of baseball  can be found here.