James Venes

Guess it’s been a little while since I touched this. It’s not for lack of things to talk about, as I’ve been keeping myself busy with work (my actual job) and play (all the photography). I also have a habit of using Twitter and Facebook to drop a link to each new gallery as I finish them and forget to go here and do it as well.

Rather than linking to every gallery I’ve created in the first month or so of the latest minor league season, the easiest thing to do would be to link to the Triple-A and Single-A galleries:

Triple-A (7 galleries so far)

Single-A (3 galleries so far)

Last week I shot a couple day games and I’ll be doing the same next week. It’s good to get out there and just speed up the settings to see just how well I can freeze the action compared to needing to tone it down a bit at night. This year one of the things I’m trying to do more of is get fewer stationary hitter shots and work more on baseballs being hit and especially plays made in the field. That’s the tougher part since you don’t know where a ball’s going to be hit, if it even does get hit in a particular at bat.

Here and there I’m also trying to go back through all my old stuff, things that used to be on the first site I had before it went down, and put it back up on the current one. That’s kind of an “in the background” project and I doubt I’ll spend a whole lot of time on it because as I start going back to 2006 or so, it’s difficult to remember who each person was in the photos. The first thing I put back up was the 2006 World Baseball Classic and I’ve also got stuff from Spring Training that year to get to sometime. It’s kind of interesting to go back and look at what I was using then vs. now and how much the quality and timing of the shots has come along. Even some of the little editing tricks improve here and there.

I’m probably going to be staying pretty close to home this year for various reasons, so the majority of what I’m shooting will be in Sacramento and Stockton. One of these days it’d be nice to get up to Oregon and Washington for some Northwest League games, and sometime in the next few years I’d love to travel to Alaska and do some photography up there – both baseball and nature.

One other thing: today Last of the Ninth hit the 100k mark for photos viewed. I’ve been using the site since April of 2008 (this was the first gallery and I shudder a little when I look at a couple of the editing things I did in that one), so that milestone was reached in just over three years. That’s a good number of photos looked at each year and based on everything that’s up there now there’s been an average of about 14 views per photo. Many have zero, but there are about 75 with 100 or more – though I still don’t know how this one of K.C. Herren has over 300, nearly 100 more than the second-most viewed. In fact, the top three on the site were from the same gallery of a game in Bakersfield. I guess a lot of Texas Rangers fans ended up going to see those pics.

Whatever the case, thanks for looking whether you’ve only seen a few or a few thousand.