The Giants win the Pennant!
They just about gave all of their fans a heart attack, but the San Francisco Giants won the National League West Division Title with a win over the San Diego Padres on the last day of the season yesterday.
For anyone who wasn’t aware of the situation, basically the Giants held a three game lead over the Padres going into their series with the Padres on Friday. All the Giants needed to do was win one game out of three to secure a spot in the playoffs. But… they knew how to make their fans stress because they ended up losing the first two games of the series before eventually pulling out a 3-0 win on Sunday.
A little stress was involved on my end as well, because you want to make sure you get the best celebration shot possible,… and the challenge is that you don’t have more than a few seconds to decide what kind of shot you’re going to get. I knew I was going to try and get a reaction shot of the pitcher first because I was positioned behind first base. I was hoping that the batter would ground out, because if that were to happen all the odds were in my favor that the pitcher would watch his teammate throw the ball to first base, …and if that were to happen, …the pitcher would be looking right at me just before his reaction.
Unfortunately, he struck the batter out.
So I took a couple of shots with my large lens of him reacting and then switched as fast as I could to my smaller lens to get a shot of the team running out to pile on each other near the mound. I think I probably fired off about five photos before the television and video guys started running into my picture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Pablo Sandoval run to the right of the pile and leap up to celebrate with Juan Uribe, so I shifted to my right and was able to get a couple more photos before all of the television and media crews had surrounded the team.
Looking back on it, I probably would have been better off just shooting the team running out of the dugout to the mound, but I’m still pretty content with the pictures I got.
It’s been a great season for the Giants though… and I’m already excited about shooting them this Thursday when the playoffs begin. Hopefully there will be some more celebrations to come!
Nice stuff man… glad you had a good time ( :