Pitcher Perfect

It's a bad pun. Get used to it.

Mix two high school softball pitchers, a coach who wasn't warned I was coming and a five-minute window, and what do you get?

If you're me, you plagarize a shoot from earlier in the week, and you down't feel bad at all when you do it.

Lighting guru and best bud Jeff Camarati (I'd link to him, but he's too lazy between web pages right at the moment) helped me set up the Matt Danford photo at UNC's Boshamer Stadium two days earlier, so I borrowed the technique of a single strobe, high off-camera to the left, at full power to knock down the background as much as I could. Of course, an Alien Bee 1600 punched out a lot more light than an SB-80, so the results aren't quite as striking, but that's life as a newspaper photographer.

Fortunately, freshman Darby Pearce (left) and junior Beth Ann Kleekamp were great sports who were easy to work with, willing to let me interrupt their pre-game preparations, and they didn't laugh when I laid down in the dirt to get just the right angle for the shot.

And I hope I had nothing to do with the fact they lost 3-2 in 12 innings...