If you were reading this blog last October, you may remember the foofaraw about the Michigan Press Association‘s Better Newspaper Contest.  Specifically, you may remember that I was awarded first and third place for sports photography in weekly class D newspapers.  Well, the 2008 BNC results were just released, and I have continued my reign of terror in the MPA by taking first place for sports photography for the second year in a row.  (The sports photography category is on pages 14 and 15 of the pdf.)

The winning photograph was from a Dexter basketball game against Chelsea; like last year, the winning photograph ran in the Dexter paper.  This is remarkable to me because my work appears in the Dexter sports section a maximum of three or four weeks a year, and yet all my award-winning photos have come from the Dexter paper instead of the Chelsea paper, where my sports work appears nearly every week of the year.

Anyway, this is the winning photograph:

And this is what the judge had to say:

The cropping mentioned in the comments isn’t so much “cropping” as it is “where the camera was pointed when the picture was taken.”  The joy of sports photography — or any sort of photojournalism, really — is that you’re shooting dynamic subjects in dynamic environments, so you have to frame on the fly; that means your framing isn’t always going to be ideal.  But as the award shows, the framing doesn’t have to be perfect when the moment is compelling enough.