Got the assignment earlier this week to photograph our newspaper’s HS Player of the Year again. Cory Quimby (left) is a repeat winner of the award – and he had the numbers to prove it. I think he averaged something like 27 points / 17 rebounds per night. No way would his Minisink Valley HS team made it to the sectional playoffs without him. He’s a good kid, a hard working big man under the boards, and really “brings it” every night. Here he is photographed at the playground he starting playing at as a youngster. I’ve included a few of my other POY portraits from the paper the past two years, including Quimby’s images from last year:
It was good to bring out a set of lights on location again and light him up on the court, as I intentionally underexposed to make the sky a little deeper blue (we got lucky with a beautiful early April day) and add the strobe. Camera: Canon 5D MarkII. ISO 100. 1/200th. sec. @ f/16. Set-up time about 15 – minutes. 
(Ideally this portrait would’ve worked better at 7PM or so instead of 5PM, as I was hoping to have the court in shadow or silhouette, but of course availability of the subject and our scheduling doesn’t always allow those finer details & requests.) Actual shooting time: 5 minutes.
Onto covering the outdoor Spring sports seasons now like lacrosse, baseball, and track… -cg.
Chet Gordon resides in the lower Hudson Valley region of New York. A photojournalist for more than 25 years, he recently worked as Westchester Magazine's first photo editor, and previously was a staff photographer at four NYC metro area newspapers. He was also a photo editor at the NY Daily News for 5 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, International Herald-Tribune, USA Today, MailOnline (UK), Army Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Popular Photography magazines, among others. He is a career member of the National Press Photographer’s Association (NPPA), and a former board member of the NY Press Photographer’s Association (NYPPA). He served honorably as a U.S. Marine in the mid-1980's, including 2+ years stationed on Okinawa, Japan, and throughout Southeast Asia. A longtime volunteer and travel enthusiast, he accompanies several humanitarian aid clients on their international disaster relief and medical missions. Since 1997, he's worked in several African countries, the Middle East, Central and South America, Eastern Europe, as well as Afghanistan, Haiti, the Russian Federation, and Thailand. He routinely mentors young photographers looking to break into the industry and vacations in Bermuda and Kenya.
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