Latest nostalgia funk takes me back to Butler University basketball

Yesterday's post on P.E. MacAllister might have made you wonder if I have been in another of my periodic nostalgic funks of late.

I don't think I'm in a very serious funk, but yes, I did feel a bit of nostalgia while composing that post. And I suppose it's fair to say that today's post is a continuation of that funk.

I hadn't worn my navy blue 2008 Butler University men's basketball Horizon League Conference Champions T-shirt in probably two or three months (possibly even longer), but something (um, nostalgia, perhaps?) nudged me to slip it on yesterday. Maybe what was on the brain was the wave of preseason college basketball stories I've been reading in the past week ... and my fond memories of following the Bulldogs exploits (including attending a dozen or so games at Butler's Hinkle Fieldhouse and yes, photographing a few of them) during their halcyon years of the early 2000s and 2010s.

My eyes came upon the T-shirt when I scanned my closet yesterday to dress for the day. I then paused to contemplate how I came about acquiring the shirt, and I reflected back to March 11, 2008, when the Bulldogs defeated Cleveland State to win the Horizon League postseason tournament, thereby qualifying for an automatic berth in the upcoming NCAA Basketball Tournament. Within a few days after that, I hopped into my car and drove to the Butler campus to shop for memorabilia in the campus spirit shop, walking out after purchasing that shirt.

After my brief flashback, I walked to the kitchen and asked Lee Ann to take a picture of the shirt's front design, which is what you see in the lead-off photo. Several hours later -- it was an absolutely gorgeous day here in Raleigh -- Lee Ann and I worked a couple hours installing the first seven pavers that will serve as a walkway from the detached garage to the back patio and deck.

While we were working, and while I was unawares, Lee Ann used her iPhone X to snap the photo of me above. I was using my foot to push and smooth sand between the cracks of the latest paver we had placed in the pathway. As you can see, I'm wearing the Butler T-shirt.

Lee Ann didn't show me the picture until this morning, after which ... I decided to do this post because I figured that everything that happened yesterday was a sign of some kind -- the combination of recognizing I was in a nostalgia funk, the fact that I asked Lee Ann to photograph the T-shirt graphic (I didn't tell her why I wanted the photo), and the coincidence of her taking the candid photograph of me working on the sidewalk ... while wearing the T-shirt.

The Butler Bulldogs men's basketball team has had a few down years, and I haven't made the effort to hunt around on the Internet on a regular basis to stay plugged in to what is happening with the team since I moved to Raleigh. So I really don't have a clue what to expect with the 2019-20 team. But I will look in on the Bulldogs from time to time when their games appear on national television (Fox Sports has been telecasting a lot of their games in recent years after purchasing rights to broadcast games in the Big East, of which Butler has been a member for several years now).

Go Bulldogs!

Reviving images from 2 college basketball games in the 2007-08 season

If you're a regular visitor to Photo Potpourri, you're aware that in the past couple years, I've gone back to some of my very old shoots -- those I did before launching this blog in 2008 -- to breathe life into images for which at the time I had insufficient tools to deal with properly in post-processing. In most cases, it was a simple matter of restoring detail to shadowed areas of an image.

The challenge in those photos was that I shot them all in JPG format (I didn't begin shooting in RAW format until 2009), so I had limited opportunities to recover accurate exposure and color information. Still, I had success with a lot of the images in the "revival" effort.

I recently decided to do the same thing with two college basketball shoots from November 2007. The first, between Butler and Indiana State universities, was on Nov. 15 at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, the home court of Butler. The other was 11 days later  in a game between the University of Indianapolis and Franklin College at Nicoson Hall on the UIndy campus.

There were a variety of challenges with those shoots -- I learned only afterward that I had inadequate gear and, in my opinion, significantly inferior lighting at the UIndy arena. Indeed, both arenas also had unlevel lighting -- brighter in the center/midcourt areas, darker at the ends where the hoops were located. I will note that lighting at Hinkle was better than that at Nicoson.

Also, I was pretty new at doing sports photography indoors. I had shot high school basketball 30 years previously, but back then I was shooting black-and-white film, and I had a dark-room technician willing and able to push my film's ASA to 1000 or more during the chemical development process.

In 2007, my primary camera was a Canon 30D, which had a regular ISO ceiling of 1600 that could be doubled to 3200 if I wanted. But pictures shot with the 30D at ISO levels above 800 reflected significant degradation due to noise. So my camera was inadequate. On top of that, my fastest lens at the time was a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, hardly an ideal tool for indoor sports. I had an OK aperture, but for indoors sports you generally need reaches of 80 to 250 millimeters.

So to get even close to proper exposure, I found myself shooting wide open (f/2.8) at 1/250 and ISO 1000 (just over my "threshold") in a lot of shots. 1/250 doesn't cut it in a fast-moving game like basketball. I was afraid to push the ISO to 1600 (or even 3200) because I didn't know there was such a thing as noise-reduction software at the time. Six months or so later, I bought Noiseware noise-reduction software and went back to many of the pictures from those two games and used it on them.

Finally, I lacked knowledge that a camera had a continuous-focus tracking mechanism to help keep more photos sharp. The 30D had such a tool (AI Servo), but at the time, AI Servo sounded like gibberish to me and I hadn't "discovered" it, much less explored it. AI Servo would make a significant difference a year or so later when I finally looked into it for subsequent sports shoots. But because I didn't use it while shooting the 2007 basketball games, quite a few photos from the shoot had to be tossed summarily. The focus on quite a lot of the pictures ended up being on the background instead of the subject(s) in the foreground. The few pictures that turned out tack sharp were the result of dumb luck, I guess.

One other piece of background information relative to the basketball shoots should be in this post. In November 2007, I was more than halfway through a photography correspondence course I had enrolled in through the New York Institute of Photography. (My experience in this course was one of my very first posts after Photo Potpourri launched in late 2008). My interest in shooting these basketball games was driven primarily by a need to fulfill an assignment associated with a recently completed chapter in the NYIP course pertaining to sports and action photography. I had to submit a photo depicting action.

I submitted the photo you see leading off the post, my favorite from the UIndy game shoot. (The requirements were to show one of these three: action that was frozen, as in this photo, blurred movement, or a panned shot in which the subject is still but the background is blurred. Personally, I think NYIP should have required one example of each, but that's my opinion).

As always, to view a larger, sharper (hopefully?) version of a photo, simply click on the image. This is particularly helpful when accessing the blog from a mobile device. To view full galleries of all the images I made (good and bad), click on this link for the UIndy game pictures, and this link for the Butler game pictures.

Above: I was very excited about this shot, and I cropped it both horizontally (as you see in the lead-off photo), and with a pseudo-vertical orientation (shown above). Neither is the original composition, however. The original contains the full length body of UIndy player Keith Radcliffe (14) taking a shot while defended by Franklin's Marty Young (44).

The next favorites of mine from that shoot feature UIndy Greyhounds guard Tyke Cocherham (5) doing a pretzel-twist under-the-basket reverse layup (above) and dribbling around a Franklin defender along the baseline (first below). In the second photo below, I have another shot of Keith Radcliffe, moments before he leaped to put up the shot shown in the lead-off photo.   

Above: Freshman Tyler Kitchel (30) dribbling into and around the stiff arm of a Franklin defender.

Above: A Franklin player is guarded by UIndy's Myron Jackson (23). (If you're wondering why I'm not identifying the Franklin athletes by name, it's because the school doesn't have a 2007-08 roster available online as do UIndy, ISU and Butler).

Above: UIndy's leading scorer in the 2007-08 season was DeAndre Brock (32), shown putting up this jump shot. 

Above: From the Butler game, this shot of Indiana State's Adam Arnold pulling down a rebound probably is my favorite because it depicts some action ... and (most importantly) is those that turned out tack sharp. 

Above: Because of the limited focal range on my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8, the only shots I had a decent chance to keep in sharp focus were those in my vicinity, like this one of Butler senior guard A.J. Graves. I had several other interesting shots of Graves elsewhere in the game, but they were not in focus.  

Above: Another shot of action coming toward me, this time Butler's Drew Streicher (32) passing off the ball to a player out of the picture. 

Butler's Zach Hahn dribbling around a defender (above) and three-point shooting specialist Pete Campbell (34) launching a jumper near the free-throw line (below). I played with the orientation of the photo below before deciding to use Campbell (on the right) and the referee (on the left) as my reference points. Yes, it appears like the court is going downhill, but ... even 11 years afterward, it still doesn't bother me too much. 

Above: Senior guard Mike Green (10), who had transferred to Butler from Towson, proved to be a valuable pickup for the Bulldogs, beginning the previous season. The Bulldogs would finish the 2007-08 season with a 30-4 record, which included a first-place 16-2 finish in the Horizon League and a league postseason tournament championship (which gave them an automatic berth into the NCAA Tournament). Butler beat South Alabama in the first round of the NCAA's before falling to Tennessee 76-71 in overtime in the second round. Below is another shot coming toward me, a safe composition for assuring sharpness when I had no continuous-focus activated.

Above and below: Fans in the legendary "Dawg Pound," who camp out at every home game in the seating area behind the east goal.  

Butler's Chrishawn Hopkins: Here's hoping he's crazy good

It was difficult to decide which direction to go with this first post from my shoot Thursday at Hinkle Fieldhouse for the Butler University men's basketball team's second (and final) exhibition game before embarking on the 2010-11 regular season schedule Saturday against Marian University, also an Indianapolis school.

After reading the college basketball preview discussion between sportswriters Terry Hutchens and Jeff Rabjohns in this morning's sports section of The Indianapolis Star, I decided to start with a focus on one of the Bulldogs' freshman recruits, Chrishawn Hopkins, whom Rabjohns termed "a crazy athlete" in the Sunday discussion.

Thursday's Bulldogs game against Hanover College was my first chance to see Hopkins and fellow Butler first-year players Khyle Marshall and Erik Fromm play. I liked what I saw in each of these athletes. I didn't quite get what Rabjohns meant about Hopkins being a "crazy athlete," unless he means simply that Hopkins is a phenomenal athlete, which I think is true. It's clear that Hopkins -- a 6-1 guard -- is athletic. He didn't score any points in the game against the Panthers, but he did have people in the crowd on the edge of their seats when he leaped high to try a one-hand a jam off an in-bounds play in the first half (he missed the shot). I managed to grab two frames of the jam, but as is the case in trying to photograph quick-action sports, you often have hit-and-miss success. In this case, it was largely a miss. I didn't have my lens zoomed out far enough, and while I captured the major section of Hopkins' upper torso with arm extended and even a sliver of the ball as he approached the basket for the jam, I didn't have it in sharp focus. I'll provide the best of the two "jam" images so you can see what I mean.

What I remember most about that play, however, was the mischievous look on Hopkins' face as he stood out of bounds along the side of the court moments before the play was to unravel. It was as if he couldn't contain himself that the play was designed to go to him -- or at least include him as an option to score. An image of that is included.

Hopkins is interesting, too, because of the odyssey that has been his life story the past few years. He attended Manual High School in the Indianapolis Public Schools system his freshman and sophomore years, then moved to Las Vegas for the start of his junior year before returning to Indianapolis and playing only a limited number of games. Before the start of his senior year, he enrolled in Herron High School, a relatively new Indianapolis liberal arts charter school. Herron's athletic director, Vince Stennett, reportedly is Hopkins' legal guardian, and it's where Sherron Wilkerson, a former Indiana University basketball standout and the 1993 Indiana Mr. Basketball from Jeffersonville, had just been hired as head coach. The Manual-Las Vegas-Manual-Herron bounce-around understandably didn't sit well with Manual High School, which contested Hopkins' transfer to Herron, suspecting athletics was a major motivation. (In Indiana -- as is the case in most states -- a student cannot transfer high schools for strictly athletic purposes, and the governing bodies of the respective state high school athletic associations usually rule on the legitimacy of such transfers when they are challenged).

Hopkins' case was a bit different, however. Because Stennett -- a faculty member at Herron -- was Hopkins' guardian, an argument could be made that Hopkins should be able to attend the school where his parent/guardian works. But the Indiana High School Athletic Association agreed with Manual; it decided Hopkins' transfer was for athletic reasons and ruled Hopkins ineligible to play basketball for Herron. Hopkins then returned to Manual to finish his high school career.

The saga was unfortunate for Hopkins, who probably would have benefited from the prospect of better academics at Herron vs. those at Manual ... which is not to slam Manual, which along with all IPS schools is waging a difficult, ongoing battle to turn around a history of sustained poor ISTEP scores (ISTEP is Indiana's annual testing system that helps gauge academic achievement standards by students and reflects on a school system's ability to help students achieve those standards). It's merely stating fact. By all accounts -- including that of Hopkins' coach at Manual, Jim Merlie -- Hopkins is an athletic, unselfish player, character traits that undoubtedly caught the attention of Butler head basketball coach Brad Stevens. "I hope you guys know you got a steal," Merlie said of Hopkins' decision to attend Butler, as reported by David Woods, The Star's Butler basketball beat writer, in March of this year.

The "steal" Merlie alludes to probably points to how the talented Hopkins might have gotten lost among many big college recruiters because of his shuttle between schools. Hopkins did not end up being a national Top 100 recruit, but then, as The Star's Woods noted earlier this year, neither was Gordon Hayward of Brownsburg. Hayward, you may remember, came to Butler three years ago as a gangly forward with decent ball-handling skills (he was 5-11 and a guard as a high school freshman before enjoying a significant growth spurt over a two-year period; he was 6-7 by the time he was a senior at Brownsburg). Once he joined Butler's Bulldogs, Hayward played extraordinary, over-the-top basketball for two years. He was a major component in Butler's successful run to the NCAA championship game against Duke last March. Hayward left Butler after his sophomore season to enter the NBA draft and was the ninth pick of the draft's first round. He now plays for the NBA's Utah Jazz.

In a stroke of irony (or would this be mere coincidence?), Hopkins wears Hayward's jersey number -- 20 -- for Butler. And if you look closely at the images in this post, it almost looks as if it is Hayward's exact jersey; Hopkins is swimming in the uniform! Hayward is now 6-8; Hopkins 6-1.

In a supportive, stable, "the Butler Way" environment, Hopkins is in a good place, one where his basketball ambitions will have a healthy opportunity to blossom and come to fruition. Here's hoping he takes advantage of this opportunity.

To view a gallery of images from Thursday's game, visit this link: Butler vs. Hanover photo gallery.

 

Above and next two images below: In Chrishawn Hopkins' on-court time in the first half of Butler's game against Hanover, Hopkins guarded the Panthers' Shawn Melton, who returned the favor when the Bulldogs went on offense. 

Note the jersey size in the images above and below ... 

While standing along the sidelines waiting to get to the ball from the referee to begin an in-bounds play, Hopkins strikes a somewhat mischievous expression. Even Hanover's Cody Osman looks like he kind of suspects something's up. Moments later, Hopkins would get the ball back -- and leap high toward the basket for a one-hand jam (below), but it didn't go in.

Butler vs. DePauw

Above: Shawn Vanzant in an unorthodox, yet agile, maneuver to unload a baseline pass to a teammate.

I had an opportunity to shoot the Butler-DePauw exhibition men's basketball game Sunday at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, so ... I took it. The Bulldogs won handily, 77-45, in a match-up between small-school DePauw and NCAA Division I power Butler.

Shown here are a few images from the shoot. A full gallery of images from my shoot at the Butler-DePauw game are available at my online site at SmugMug.com.

Above: A DePauw defender was just out of reach of this Gordon Hayward layup in second-half action.Above: Also in the second half, Gordon Hayward is shown in the throes of a two-handed, uncontested fast-break slam dunk.


Above: 6-11 Freshman Andrew Smith (44) gets resistance from DePauw's 5-10 senior Tony James.


Above: A pump fake by Willie Veasley gets DePauw's Jarrett Hamilton (33) in the air, allowing Veasley to attempt a bank shot moments later (next photo below).


Above: Willie Veasley gets off a bank shot near the basket despite the arm of a DePauw defender.
Above: Butler's Shelvin Mack (1) slicing through DePauw defenders Drew Willis (14) and Tony Callen (12) while attempting a drive to the bucket.
Above: The hands and arms of DePauw defenders present formidable obstacles for Butler's Ronald Nored as he contemplates a move toward the basket.