In early September, I got an e-mail from the Youth Sports Director at our local YMCA with this plea:

Would you want to coach again with an assistant? :):):):):) I may need one more….are you in? PLEASE

She followed this up with a phone call and another plea to the three most likely dads on the team:

The 3 of you have had lots of experience with YMCA Soccer!  I have total faith in you to help out with the 7-9 team that needs a coach!   I have placed [your kids] on the same team so you 3 could help each other with covering games and practices.

My “lots of experience” consists of watching my kids’ games for a couple of years, and assistant coaching my son’s team this past spring. I’ve never played soccer. I was a bit skeptical that I was a good choice for the job, but I didn’t want there to  be three co-coaches. Without a clear leader, I was afraid that would lead to confusing practices, and potential conflicts of leadership style (or lack thereof). So I replied “I’ll take the lead role.” And with those 5 words began my first ever experience as a coach of a sports team.

Fortunately, the YMCA sports program is low competition. That means I was coaching for participation and could spend time working on basic skills rather than trying to figure out how to win games. I checked out a couple of books from the library, and read through the material provided by the YMCA, and formulated a plan for my first practice. I used much the same plan for every practice:

• warm up and stretching
• low stress ball handling practice (dribbling with various goals)
• speed and physical mobility (short sprints, stops, turns)
• medium stress ball handling (one-to-one team work, one-vs-one handling, “knock-out”)
• scrimmage, forcing everyone to play every position

When I coached the games, I had a clip board with a grid of the kids names on rows, and four columns to write their positions for each quarter. I had witnessed as a parent other parents questioning coaches as to how much their kids played, and whether or not they got their fair share of time. So I wanted to be sure I was as fair as possible, and in the first couple of games, I tried to rotate the kids through a variety of positions so that they could all get a feel for them. In the later games, I tried as much as possible to honor the kids’ requests for their position of choice.

I was really fortunate in the kids that were on my team. Of the 11 kids, I had one fantastic player, 8 reasonably strong players, and only 2 “Space Cadets”–the term one of my friends uses for the kids who just don’t seem to get it. I was typically able to keep the Space Cadets separated, and paired with a stronger player to help compensate.

My assistant coaches were decent guys and were generally helpful during practices and games. One of them, Kent, had a habit of constantly yelling instructions at the kids during the game. “Get on that ball. Go! Go! Go! We’re going that way guys! Get down there. Go! Go! Go! Pass it to the center! Pass it to the center! Get up the field!” all in the space of about 10 seconds. It was incredibly tiresome, and drowned me out on a number of occasions. Rather than tell him to tone it down, I just let it go, and instructed the kids as much as possible during play stoppage.

Kent also had a habit of getting onto the field by a step or two. Normally I didn’t worry much about it especially when play was not close to us. But one time he was about three steps into the field, and play had come pretty close to us. I was afraid the referee was going to reprimand him so I said to Kent “You may want to step off the field.” His response? “You should read the rules. We’re allowed to have one coach on the field.” I corrected him: “I have read the rules, and that applies to the younger groups, not this age group.” He stepped off the field. The next game when he found himself accidentally on the field, he quickly stepped off.

In the end, it was a positive experience. The kids were a lot of fun, and the parents were generally communicative when their kids weren’t going to be at a game or practice. At the end-of-season “banquet” a number of them thanked me for my efforts. I’m glad did it.

Oh, and by the way, our record (“We don’t keep track at the Y”) was 6-0.

For years we’ve made a tradition out of carving pumpkins. This year was no different. I don’t have a lot of commentary to add, so I’ll just throw out some pictures.

Nathan doesn't like scooping out the guts (neither do I)

Emily with pumpkin guts

Here I’m just playing with the flash, using a “snoot” to limit the flash to a spot.

Pumpkin in the spot light

Here’s our standard family portrait. This time the cats wanted to play.

My pumpkin, with the flash inside.

Nathan looking into the pumpkin, flash inside.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. –Lewis Carroll

I’ve had some ideas kicking around in my head, but without a particular photographic goal in mind. Primarily I’ve been wanting to capture traffic motion and fall color.  My original hope was to capture them together. So I went onto a pedestrian bridge near my house at dusk, hoping to capture (ideally) some pretty trees with cars’ light streaks going by. The result is, well, meh.

Lots of streaks, not much fall color. Then there’s the opposite, lots of color, not much streaks:

Again, not terribly fascinating. And these were the best of my time on the bridge.

Next, I thought it would be fun to see a tree lit from below with a flash and umbrella. Unfortunately, it was getting pretty dark, so there was a huge difference between the man holding the umbrella and the tree, neither of which is terribly fascinating.

One lesson from this shot: the full power of this flash directly in the face will make a grown man nauseous. Blech.

The final idea that’s been kicking around for a while has been to shoot a very small cemetery on the edge of the parking lot of my office. From the cemetery, it is easy to see up the hill of I-270, so again with the traffic motion thing, I was hoping to get an interesting contrast: movement and stasis or life and death. What I got was a bunch more meh. So then I tried shooting some of the markers with colorful trees in the background.  This shot originally had a very red maple in the background, but the red distracted from the detail. So I converted it to gray-scale, and it is now my favorite of this set:

Finally, another self portrait.

Get your own damn beer

The idea for a double self portrait came from this guys work. I absolutely love his self portraits, especially this one. Having spent 30 minutes trying to make my left arm blend with my body behind, I’m completely amazed at just how good his shot it.

So, there they are–a number of random shots. I really didn’t know where I was going with them. Fortunately, I got there right on time.

So I’ve taken my flash “off camera”. But that isn’t always practical. Mobile candid photos, for example, don’t lend them selves well to off camera flash. I’ve tried bouncing the flash off the ceiling, but that can give the shot “lit from above” appearance.

Reading various photography blogs, I eventually stumbled across the Gary Fong Lightsphere diffuser. They’re interesting looking and $40 on Amazon. But as with many successful products, there are DIY versions. One seemed imminently workable with one minor problem: the material he suggested was at the UK Ikea. The first place I tried to find an alternate proved successful: The Container Store.

I followed the instructions loosely and now have my own DIY diffuser.

Tonight I got a chance to play with it while my daughter was reading (and attempting to ignore me).

It has a decent amount of directionality, but the vertical doesn’t look like it is lit from above. I especially like it pointed to the right (at a large neutral wall with a large glass covered print).

Finally, although this shot isn’t as instructive as the ones above, I like how the camera really floats on the over exposed back ground.