On My Attempts to Shoot Sports on Film From the Stands With a Point-and-Shoot Camera from 2003

Result: Not as bad as it could be!

I have spent much of 2024 in a sort of pubescence with film photography. I love every aspect of the practice (though I don’t develop my own film) save for the actual machines used in the practice. For the sake of avoiding the shame of realizing how many cameras I’ve gone through this year, I won’t list them out here, but I’ve fallen prey to broken zoom-lens mechanisms that rendered the entire camera inoperable (thankfully both of which were under warranty), spokes that failed to advance film, and… well, the most trustworthy of them to date I accidentally dropped on the ground and broke last weekend. Alas.

After the death of my Kodak EasyLoad 35, with which I took a few pretty good shots, I’m down to one immediately usable camera, a Canon Sure Shot 115U that I bought at an antique store last month. I took this camera to the Kansas Jayhawks / Houston Cougars football game at Arrowhead Stadium for its maiden voyage. I got a few decent shots out of the experience, most of them contained to the stands. The one at the top of this post is probably the only one from the actual field of play that I like (the shadows at Arrowhead Stadium and the fact that our seats are right on the 40 yard line really helped me out there)

Most of the shots from that day reflect the experimental nature of the day (to put it nicely). I find them kind of interesting in context, though:

The first thing to understand here is that the Sure Shot 115u is smarter than I am. It has some sort of computer bullshit going on within that keeps me from taking unfocused shots. In practice, this is very annoying, as I am used to less finnicky point-and-shoot cameras that will expose the film regardless of whether the shot’s in focus or not. The above photo was taken when I tried to get a shot of the kicker in motion, but the camera hesitated and I jerked the camera upwards to examine what it was actually doing as the shutter actually went. It ended up with this UFO-like shot of the Arrowhead press box. I remember specifically trying to get a kicker in the act of kicking, but I found no success.

Case in point

It hits me how thin the line between a focused, well-organized shot and a directionless shot lays. If the picture had taken a split second earlier, we’d have a kicker with the leg high, maybe even the ball in flight, and a line of Houston players sprinting in unison. Instead, what we have is a kicker looking downfield and a disorganized mass of Houston players sprinting away.

I found a similar issue here, as I don’t really have a focal point in this shot of an offensive snap by the Jayhawks. There are interesting subjects— the mesh point between the quarterback and halfback, the cornerback beading in on the wide receiver, the scrum of offensive and defensive linemen, and the attentive idling on the sideline —but this doesn’t capture any of them in enough detail to make for an interesting photo, in my opinion.

This one’s too blurry to make much use of. If taken a second later, maybe a motion blur along with a running receiver could’ve made for something interesting. I think this evokes something, in fact I imagine after some time this will reflect the eerie, haunted quality that accompanied the Jayhawks in Arrowhead Stadium, but at the moment I’m not getting a print made for it. I also tried to get shots of the Marching Jayhawks in action:

You wanna talk about photos that reflect the eerie haunted quality of the Jayhawks’ tenure at Arrowhead Stadium? This is that. These are identifiably the Marching Jayhawks, though it’s hard to pick out any individual member in detail. I kind of like the effect we get here, but I’m not sending it to the School of Music.

Now here’s where a motion blur suits the photo. I wish I would’ve framed it differently, so that I got more of the field behind the baton twirler. What if I cropped this to put the drum majors in the bottom third rather than the upper?

That’s something, isn’t it? Again, it’s not great, but it’s something else. I should stress that this was something like the second day I ever spent with this camera, so I should get better work with practice. What I’ve learned is that I’m not a natural with sports photography and that I need to find a copy of the camera manual online somewhere to understand it better.