In all the craziness of this year’s HS playoff basketball tournaments the past few weeks, I’ve just gotten around to writing about the above piece in Popular Photography magazine. A photo of mine with an accompanying story was published last month. (March 2010 – page 42.) Click HERE. It was actually a file photo from a HS basketball playoff game here in my coverage area made 2 years ago, and I’ve previously written extensively on the preparation and execution in making the image here on the blog. Click HERE to view those earlier links. The real interest in the image itself was that not only was the image made from a remote camera mounted behind the backboard glass – that camera also fired the arena (studio) strobes a colleague and I installed the night before in the college gym for the weekend’s playoff games. Professionally for me and extremely gratifying was the exposure of one my images in a national magazine. I began receiving emails from photographers around the country who’d seen the piece as subscribers, when I couldn’t find a copy of it here in any of the big retail bookstores in my area. A couple of local photographers teased me about the piece at a big HS basketball game (where else?) one Friday night in late February; that due to scheduling, I wasn’t even working. It was a big deal game between two local rivals and I still sat along the baseline to watch the game from what would’ve been my normal working perspective.
In all seriousness, it all began by answering what looked like a generic or possibly even a junk email after Christmas, which materialized into a series of phone interviews with the senior editor at the magazine, subsequently followed up by email submissions of the images from me.
*A final word on having a photograph like this not only seen by other editors, but the rights purchased for publication (from the paper) and a decent fee paid to us both. Proves again that you never, ever know who’s looking at your work from afar…
Big fun. Nice tearsheet(s). I’m looking forward to hanging this piece on my office wall sometime soon. ~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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