What a weekend! It all ended yesterday with an incredible football game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals … but all began with a very long day covering the 2009 Minisink Valley Cheerleading Competition!
For the second year in a row, we covered the Minisink Ultimate Cheerleading Competition in Slate Hill New York and this year was bigger, better and featured nearly 50 cheerleading squads! Needless to say, we weren’t expecting to have the kind of response that we did!
As we started setting up our table and background, people began swarming our table – checking out all of the cool cheerleading products and custom action posters we had on display. Almost immediately after we finished setting everything up, we had a line of cheerleaders who couldn’t wait to have their picture taken for their own poster!
Once everything was setup and running smoothly at the table, I headed over to the judges area to setup a single light, high above the crowds, to help illuminate the cheerleaders during their routines. When all of my settings were just right, I found a nice, comfortable spot on the hard gym floor in front of the judges and started snapping away!
Just the same as last year, it was still tough to anticipate the next jump, kick or flip – even after watching some of their warmup routines! However, I decided to shoot with two lenses this time – our 70-200 and 24-70 – which allowed me to capture a bit more of the action! Here are some of the shots from Saturday …
With the 24-70, I figured I would use the best timing that I could to try and capture some full team jump shots … here were two of my best …
But the best part of the entire day was capturing an entire routine … and seeing some of the shots that I caught! While the judges were doing their thing, I would browse through the images I just captured to see if there was anything that needed to be removed and would often come across images just like this …
People in the stands must have thought I was a little crazy as I would have my head down, looking at the back of the camera, would come across an image like this and just start laughing all by myself!
One image that I came across brought me right back to last year! Remember this girl from our post about Frozen Face Cheerleaders?
Well … guess who I captured again …
