By: John Sparenberg
The Hershey Bears and Lehigh Valley Phantoms went outdoors last night at Hersheypark Stadium in the Capital Blue Cross Outdoor Classic, and in front of an announced crowd of 13,091, Phantoms' netminder Alex Lyon put on a classic performance, stopping 41 shots to backstop his club to a 5-2 win.
The Phantoms struck first 2:59 into the contest when their captain, Colin McDonald captured a rebound and lit the lamp for the second time this season.
The visitors closed out the first period scoring at 8:28 of the opening stanza when Alex Krushelnyski banked in a shot off the body of Bears netminder Pheonix Copley to make it 2-0 Lehigh Valley.
With a little more than three minutes left in the second period, Hershey's Nathan Walker, who beat Lyon last season in overtime in Lehigh Valley in the opening game of the playoff series between the Keystone State, beat him again with a rebound from the high slot to make it 2-1.
The Beard looked poised to take a one-goal deficit and the momentum from Walker's goal into the third period, but a defensive zone turnover by John Albert turned into an unassisted goal by Chris Conner at 19:53 halted that thought.
The 3-1 score held up late in the third period, and with his club still facing the two-goal deficit, Hershey head coach gambled and pulled Copley for an extra attacker, and his gamble paid off when Travis Boyd, on an assist from Walker, blasted a laser by Lyon at 17:04.
However, Lehigh Valley veterans T.J. Brennan and Conner each made sure that Mann's gambled did not pay further dividends, when they each added a goal into Copley's vacated cage to seal the win for the Phantoms.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Monday, January 15, 2018
Capturing a Classic...Again
By: John Sparenberg
A successful hockey club consists of a group of battle tested players from various locales, backgrounds, and experiences, making adjustments and ultimately coming together on the ice, utilizing their individual strengths to help the club succeed.
And when it's your job to capture an event both on and off the ice in photographic form, especially one that doesn't happen every day and promises to be a spectacle like the upcoming Capital Blue Cross Outdoor Classic game at Hersheypark Stadium, like Bill Duh is, you follow the same philosophy in assembling your crew.
Duh, who has photographed three previous AHL outdoor games, knows first hand from covering those events just how much a factor the weather can be. In the first one in Syracuse, New York in 2010, the game was played under snowy conditions, and the snow was accompanied by 30-degree temperatures and wind gusts. In the Bears' initial outdoor adventure against the then Adirondack Phantoms, in Citizen Bank Park in Philadelphia, Pa., in 2012, the game was contested under unseasonably warm temperatures, and the Bears' previous outdoor outing against the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in January of 2013, was also contested in somewhat windy and very cold conditions, that didn't detract from the game, but only added to the atmosphere and aura of the event.
Early forecasts showed some precipitation possible for this year's game, and although Duh was a little reluctant to talk about it when I interviewed him, obviously he has talked it over with his crew and has a contingency plan should mother nature come calling in the form of the wet stuff.
"”I don’t want to look to far ahead and jinx it, no bad weather! If it’s…,’ Duh hesitated,’ rain, and I don’t want to bring up that word. We’d still shoot pretty much the same; we’d just have to put into effect our plan to cover up our gear. They make a ballistic nylon wrap that you put around camera gear that we all have or an Op/Tech weather bag, and with those you put your hands up in the bag, but you can still shoot the photos. But, if it snows and it’s just flurries, we probably won’t really have to change anything.’
In addition to the Saturday evening marquee match-up featuring the Hershey Bears and the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, there are an assortment of events scheduled for the weekend, including the Pepsi Fan Fest, which will feature various musical acts, and oh yes, there are also various scheduled appearances by Bears' alumni, and, a Friday evening game on the Hersheypark stadium ice, featuring the Bears' alumni facing off against the Philadelphia Flyers' alumni team.
All of that activity promises to make for a busy weekend for the JustSports Photography "all-star" team that Duh has assembled for this special occasion. In addition to JustSports' full-time team that includes Bill, Nancy Attrill, and Bruce Tyson, there will be a strong supporting cast including; Pat Jacoby, Athletics Multimedia Coordinator/Assistant Sports Information Director at DeSales University, JJ Horvath, team photographer for the National Arena (Football) League's Lehigh Valley Steelhawks, Scott Thomas, team photographer for the American Hockey League's Syracuse Crunch, and Jeff Pittenger, photographer for USA Today Sports Images.
"We were spread out a little thin and were ran ragged last game and that’s not a bad thing, that’s in the fun of doing stuff, but that’s not going to happen this time, said Duh, who along with Attrill, Tyson, Pittenger, and John Whitehead, former Patriot-News photographer, shot the 2103 game in Hershey. "For this game, We’re reassembling the same bunch who did last year’s AHL all-star game in Allentown. There’s so much hustle that goes on to get the job done on an event of this magnitude, and I wanted to bring these guys into this again, because they are familiar with how much hustle goes into shooting an event like this."
Not only will hustle be required to document the Outdoor Classic, but endurance will also come into play for the JustSports crew. The first event that they are scheduled to shoot will be around 9:00 on Friday morning, and the schedule for the rest of that day and Saturday is virtually non-stop, and to make the challenge even greater for the group who will be lugging their gear from location to location, multiple events are scheduled simultaneously throughout the vast area of the stadium, but thanks to knowledge gained from the last outdoor game at the same venue, the gang will be well equipped and strategically positioned to tackle the task.
"You don’t realize how spread out things are from a stadium event, and when you look back, you say, wow, how did we do it"!, said Duh, who resides in the Allentown area, and who "rested up" for the Outdoor Classic by shooting games for all three teams that JustSports are the primary photographers for; the Bears, the Phantoms, and the Binghamton Devils. "The stadium covers like a block and a half area, and multiple things are happening at the exact same time, and that’s a lot of area to cover. Having the extra crew will allow us to have for example, someone out in the stadium covering an autograph signing or something else at the fan fest, while someone else is uploading some photos."
Although he was highly satisfied with the finished product provided by his team five years ago, there were a few other things that Duh, who has been photographing professional hockey for thirty years, saw that came into focus when he reflected back upon the event.
"Again, you learn from the way you’ve done it before. Last game we really didn’t have an idea on a lot of things. They can tell you the players are going to enter the field from here or there, and you can take up a position where you can only hope it’s the best angle. This time I know we will definitely ask more questions this time, such as when they say the players are going to enter from here, we will ask in what manner. That way we can get an idea as to what the background is going to look like behind them."
He continued, "Something we also didn’t do the last time was leave at least one person dedicated to shooting crowd shots, such as going inside the stadium to the different types of concession stands are, and this time we are definitely going to do that, dedicating at least one person to doing that. We all concentrated on being at ice level and close to the action, this time we are going to keep at least one person set way back and up from ice level to capture that angle. We took some early shots last game from that perspective last game, but that was only before they dropped the puck, but this time we will have someone shooting from up high throughout the event."
After the final horn has sounded on Saturday night signifying the game is over for the players, their work for the evening will be completed, but that same signal for the JustSports crew only means that they are moving on to the next phase of their job for this outdoor spectacle.
The next phase in their labor involves downloading, editing, and then finally burning to DVD the images from the game, a process that normally concludes about two hours after the final horn has sounded on a normal night shooting indoors.
However, on this special occasion where there will undoubtedly be thousands of images to process, with the star-studded JustSports crew capturing all of the action on the ice and the atmosphere in the stands, the same task is expected to take a minimum of three hours to complete.
After all, you can't rush a classic...it takes time to put it into perfect focus, a job that the JustSports team is well equipped to handle.
A successful hockey club consists of a group of battle tested players from various locales, backgrounds, and experiences, making adjustments and ultimately coming together on the ice, utilizing their individual strengths to help the club succeed.
And when it's your job to capture an event both on and off the ice in photographic form, especially one that doesn't happen every day and promises to be a spectacle like the upcoming Capital Blue Cross Outdoor Classic game at Hersheypark Stadium, like Bill Duh is, you follow the same philosophy in assembling your crew.
Duh, who has photographed three previous AHL outdoor games, knows first hand from covering those events just how much a factor the weather can be. In the first one in Syracuse, New York in 2010, the game was played under snowy conditions, and the snow was accompanied by 30-degree temperatures and wind gusts. In the Bears' initial outdoor adventure against the then Adirondack Phantoms, in Citizen Bank Park in Philadelphia, Pa., in 2012, the game was contested under unseasonably warm temperatures, and the Bears' previous outdoor outing against the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins in January of 2013, was also contested in somewhat windy and very cold conditions, that didn't detract from the game, but only added to the atmosphere and aura of the event.
Early forecasts showed some precipitation possible for this year's game, and although Duh was a little reluctant to talk about it when I interviewed him, obviously he has talked it over with his crew and has a contingency plan should mother nature come calling in the form of the wet stuff.
"”I don’t want to look to far ahead and jinx it, no bad weather! If it’s…,’ Duh hesitated,’ rain, and I don’t want to bring up that word. We’d still shoot pretty much the same; we’d just have to put into effect our plan to cover up our gear. They make a ballistic nylon wrap that you put around camera gear that we all have or an Op/Tech weather bag, and with those you put your hands up in the bag, but you can still shoot the photos. But, if it snows and it’s just flurries, we probably won’t really have to change anything.’
In addition to the Saturday evening marquee match-up featuring the Hershey Bears and the Lehigh Valley Phantoms, there are an assortment of events scheduled for the weekend, including the Pepsi Fan Fest, which will feature various musical acts, and oh yes, there are also various scheduled appearances by Bears' alumni, and, a Friday evening game on the Hersheypark stadium ice, featuring the Bears' alumni facing off against the Philadelphia Flyers' alumni team.
All of that activity promises to make for a busy weekend for the JustSports Photography "all-star" team that Duh has assembled for this special occasion. In addition to JustSports' full-time team that includes Bill, Nancy Attrill, and Bruce Tyson, there will be a strong supporting cast including; Pat Jacoby, Athletics Multimedia Coordinator/Assistant Sports Information Director at DeSales University, JJ Horvath, team photographer for the National Arena (Football) League's Lehigh Valley Steelhawks, Scott Thomas, team photographer for the American Hockey League's Syracuse Crunch, and Jeff Pittenger, photographer for USA Today Sports Images.
"We were spread out a little thin and were ran ragged last game and that’s not a bad thing, that’s in the fun of doing stuff, but that’s not going to happen this time, said Duh, who along with Attrill, Tyson, Pittenger, and John Whitehead, former Patriot-News photographer, shot the 2103 game in Hershey. "For this game, We’re reassembling the same bunch who did last year’s AHL all-star game in Allentown. There’s so much hustle that goes on to get the job done on an event of this magnitude, and I wanted to bring these guys into this again, because they are familiar with how much hustle goes into shooting an event like this."
Not only will hustle be required to document the Outdoor Classic, but endurance will also come into play for the JustSports crew. The first event that they are scheduled to shoot will be around 9:00 on Friday morning, and the schedule for the rest of that day and Saturday is virtually non-stop, and to make the challenge even greater for the group who will be lugging their gear from location to location, multiple events are scheduled simultaneously throughout the vast area of the stadium, but thanks to knowledge gained from the last outdoor game at the same venue, the gang will be well equipped and strategically positioned to tackle the task.
"You don’t realize how spread out things are from a stadium event, and when you look back, you say, wow, how did we do it"!, said Duh, who resides in the Allentown area, and who "rested up" for the Outdoor Classic by shooting games for all three teams that JustSports are the primary photographers for; the Bears, the Phantoms, and the Binghamton Devils. "The stadium covers like a block and a half area, and multiple things are happening at the exact same time, and that’s a lot of area to cover. Having the extra crew will allow us to have for example, someone out in the stadium covering an autograph signing or something else at the fan fest, while someone else is uploading some photos."
Although he was highly satisfied with the finished product provided by his team five years ago, there were a few other things that Duh, who has been photographing professional hockey for thirty years, saw that came into focus when he reflected back upon the event.
"Again, you learn from the way you’ve done it before. Last game we really didn’t have an idea on a lot of things. They can tell you the players are going to enter the field from here or there, and you can take up a position where you can only hope it’s the best angle. This time I know we will definitely ask more questions this time, such as when they say the players are going to enter from here, we will ask in what manner. That way we can get an idea as to what the background is going to look like behind them."
He continued, "Something we also didn’t do the last time was leave at least one person dedicated to shooting crowd shots, such as going inside the stadium to the different types of concession stands are, and this time we are definitely going to do that, dedicating at least one person to doing that. We all concentrated on being at ice level and close to the action, this time we are going to keep at least one person set way back and up from ice level to capture that angle. We took some early shots last game from that perspective last game, but that was only before they dropped the puck, but this time we will have someone shooting from up high throughout the event."
After the final horn has sounded on Saturday night signifying the game is over for the players, their work for the evening will be completed, but that same signal for the JustSports crew only means that they are moving on to the next phase of their job for this outdoor spectacle.
The next phase in their labor involves downloading, editing, and then finally burning to DVD the images from the game, a process that normally concludes about two hours after the final horn has sounded on a normal night shooting indoors.
However, on this special occasion where there will undoubtedly be thousands of images to process, with the star-studded JustSports crew capturing all of the action on the ice and the atmosphere in the stands, the same task is expected to take a minimum of three hours to complete.
After all, you can't rush a classic...it takes time to put it into perfect focus, a job that the JustSports team is well equipped to handle.
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