D'Feeters

Plano Labor Day Tournament
The 89 and 90 teams both advanced to the semi-final games on Sunday. Congratulations to all the players, and their opponents, who played under the extreme heat. (I, for one, faded during the semi-finals.)
September 4, 2000 90 v Dallas Texans
Left at half-time with the Texans ahead 3-0. The extreme heat finally got to me. I would have liked to have made the final games but I just ran out of gas.

September 4, 2000 89 v M.C. Tejanos
Tournament semi-final game. The game ends after two overtimes tied 2-2. M.C. Tejanos win the shootout. (Tejanos then went on to almost beat Sting in the finals. Cannot imagine or grasp the fitness those girls must have.)

September 3, 2000 90 v M.C. Tejanos
D'Feeters win 2-0. Raven played keeper until the water break in the second half. After the water break she really gave the team a lift as they then scored their two goals. (She did not score either goal but just really made a difference in the game.)

September 3, 2000 90 v. Houston Eclipse
D'Feeters won the game. (I just don't remember the score. Doug is beginning to realize a little soccer and heat overload.)

September 3, 2000 89 v Tulsa Nationals
D'Feeters won this game big as they needed the points to win their bracket.

September 2, 2000 90 v Dallas Inter-North
Defeated Inter 1-0. It was so hot. I had to pinch myself to be certain I had not died and gone to #$%^.

September 2, 2000 89 v Solar
D'Feeters got ahead 2-0 at the half but Solar came roaring back in the second half to tie the game 2-2.

August 7, 2000 90 v Texas Comets Red
It was a pleasant surprise for Lesia and I to show up for this game to discover that the D'Feeters' opponent was our friends from Soccer Spectrum Mike Wilson, Jim Newman, Natalie, et al. As a result I probably got many more shots of the D'Feeters' opponent than I usually do. Looking forward to seeing my photos. I just love PM games at UT-D. Standing on the west side of the field I have the sun at my back with large trees behind the players on the east side. It really is a rather picturesque soccer field. (I just have to get all the parents to sit on the west side so that they are not in the photos. Ha ha.) Here is a link to the Texas Comets website.

August 6, 2000 89 v Mean Green
Got a nice surprise when I discovered that the 89 team was playing immediately following the 90 game. Many thanks to Lauren Jones' parents for giving me a roll of film. I showed up at the 90 game with 5 rolls of 36 exposure film but it was not enough. I think I got several of the goals but I remember missing a few also. One of the big lessons of sports photography is that it is critical to watch the entire game through your camera. That is actually difficult.

August 6, 2000 90 v. Storm-Blue
Defeated Storm-Blue 7-1. Don't know how good the photos will be since the Farmers Branch fields are very difficult for photography. Soccer is relatively new to Texas. It is very new to people in-charge of designing parks with soccer fields. What is rule #1? Well, rule #1 is soccer fields are made of grass, not concrete. They got rule #1 right. Rule #2 is soccer fields, like tennis courts, should always run north-south, not east-west. It is surprising how many North Texas fields have been constructed that violate rule #2. (One of the best examples are the fields in Arlington were the Puma Cup is played - Yuck!!!) Of course, that is also why it is such a treat for me to photograph games at UT Dallas and Richland College.

Doug's Equipment
First, I take photos the old fashioned way. For the team photos and individual portraits I use my new toy, a Nikon F5. This is Nikon's top of the line professional 35mm camera. (Old fashioned from the sense that it is still a "film" camera. Actually, it is a small computer that requires film.) My only autofocus lens is a Nikon 24mm-120mm zoom lens. This is a tremendous range for a zoom lens. I would rank it as a middle-to-upper end amateur lens. The quality of the shots I have taken with this lens lens are pretty good, in my opinion. The portrait shots were also taken using a "warming filter." For you photo buffs out there, I brought the 24mm-120mm lens to a D'Feeters scrimmage and it was worthless. 300mm is about the minimum needed to take game photos.

For the games I use a 20-year old Nikon F-3 camera. It is a manual focus camera, although the shutter speed is automatically determined by the camera based upon the film that I am using and the f-stop that I manually select. I also use a Nikon 300mm f2.8 lens and a Nikon TC-14b Teleconverter. This makes the effective focal length of the lens 420mm. I use the old camera at the games because of that "long and fast" 300mm manual focus lens. I estimate it would cost me about $7,000 to buy the autofocus versions of the lens and teleconverter to use with the F5. (Hence, I continue to use the old camera.) Nikon has introduced an autofocus 80-400mm zoom lens that should be on the market soon. I suspect I will buy one when it becomes available. (Actually, I could go out and buy the new version of the 300mm lens but I would then also have to get a new version of a spouse.) I am hoping to soon have a 2x teleconverter to use with the 300mm lens.

Despite the bright sunlight I have become a big fan of 800 speed film. This allows me to "stop-down" the lens giving me a very broad "depth of field," i.e. more stuff is in focus. Lately I have been using Kodak PJ-800 Ektapress film, although I am traditionally a big fan of Fugi film. I buy the film through a New York mail order house, usually 40 rolls at a time.

Given the vast number of photos that I take, I then take the film to Sam's for processing. Sam's does a decent job and charges less than 1/2 the price of the more conventional processors. Once I get the prints back I scan them (the prints) using a Hewlett Packard Photosmart scanner. The resulting scan is a .tiff file approximately 1.6meg in size. I then compress the photos into .jpg files using ThumbsPlus software.

I then construct the web pages using Microsoft Frontpage. This is actually the easiest part of the process. This software is no more difficult to use than Wordperfect or Word.

The final step is to upload the files to my own internet server. It is an old Pentium 90 computer that Dr. Dave Turner converted into a Linux web server. Before I got the server I was constantly having to delete old photos as I added new ones. For now, anyway, I have unlimited web space in which to put my photos.