Didn’t take my Nikons. It was a serious mistake.

Football Friday Night High School Football with a Canon G9 instead of a Nikon D300 - Photo by Gary Gardiner/SmallTown Stock

It was going to be a simple evening of high school football. Me and a couple of grandchildren at the season opener. I no longer shoot high school football, or most high school sports. There are plenty of photographers who love the low wages, the requirements for fast, expensive lenses, and dark stadiums.

I did take my Canon G9, the one with screws missing and, from what I’ve been told by too many camera technicians is impossible, a dust ball on the sensor.

I was taking it only for protection. My condom against disaster.

As luck would have it, disaster struck. It was a minor disaster. Still, it wasn’t  what was planned.

Before the game teams could take the field for pre-game ceremonies and final warmups, a very large and threatening storm front moved across the city prematurely darkening the skies and filling the early night air with lightning.

The crowd was wisely advised to go into the school until the storm passed. Like most news photographers I remained outside ready for lightning strikes or tornadic winds. My Palm Pre browser, viewing the mobile weather.com site,  showed me it would be some time before the game would start, if at all.

The problem was I was holding only the G9. It’s a fine camera but the camera’s higher ISO settings and poor shadow performance meant I’d not be too successful getting a lightning photo or emotional crowd shot. I alsodidn’t have a tripod, almost a necessity for a night lightning photo.

I had to prop the G9 on fence posts, light poles, brick corner posts, and the soccer goal. None were sturdy enough for long exposures, especially with my hands as the other steady anchor points.

I changed my work process to exclude lightning photos and concentrate on the roiling clouds as they moved over the stadium. Even then I was limited by the G9’s limited wide angle view the prevented deep verticals. The widest vertical I could get didn’t include a good compositional element with the stadium and the lights at the base.  I couldn’t back up any further. I was already shooting through a chain link fence at the edge of the parking lot.

I shot away, G9 at the ready, noisy, slow, too narrow a view, and missing screws.

Even then, the resulting photo wasn’t bad. I was just not happy that it could have been with a D300, 14-24, and a tripod.