Nantwich sports photographer calls job 'ridiculous at times' - BBC

Remember when pushy sports parents were deserving objects of our collective scorn? When Marv Marinovich and Jim Pierce were bywords for abusive fatherhood, Sarah Palin made the overbearing hockey mom a global punchline, and grim stories of pushy parents assaulting officials, kids and one another grabbed headlines and trained a harsh spotlight on youth sports? Well, the rebrand is in full swing. Team Moms: Baseball is a glossy new reality series premiering Thursday that aims to recast the pushy sports parent as something well worth coveting, a sexy black hat with a designer label. From the makers of Love Island (ITV America), for Hollywood’s most rapacious studio (Paramount Skydance), with none other than basketball mom Kim Kardashian attached as executive producer, the Paramount+ series follows a cluster of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy – a Scottsdale, Arizona baseball hothouse with an intense focus on cultivating diamond gems.

I’ve enjoyed photography for decades. Like most folks my age, I began with a Kodak Brownie camera, the results about what would be expected. But, for my master’s thesis research at the University of Hawaii, I studied an exotic critter in an exotic locale: giant land crabs on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. On a whim, I applied for a grant from the National Geographic Society. Bingo. They funded my work and lent me fantastic Nikon cameras, lenses and a hundred rolls of Kodachrome slide film. I shot it all and submitted 2,000 images. They liked five, and bought none. Then sent one of their staff to do a photo-essay on “my” study animal. But I was hooked on camera gear I couldn’t afford, and sold an article about the crabs with my photographs to Natural History Magazine. That was my start as a “professional” wildlife photographer. I got into sports photography, taking pictures of my son and daughter, using good, aged equipment purchased from a newspaper that was transitioning from traditional to digital photography. Other parents were still using Brownie Instamatics and appreciated better photos.

Taylor Swift is putting in some serious overtime ... going from the stage in Los Angeles to the stands in Kansas City in less than 24 hours. 🏈 | Taylor Swift supporting her husband Travis Kelce at this afternoons Chiefs game. https://t.co/pkjr8JXFc3