For this week’s challenge, our host, Beth, writes, “This week I am challenging you to feature sports activities. Show us your favorite sports, teams, athletes, fans, sporting equipment, stadiums, or anything else related to sports.” You can read her entire challenge post on Wandering Dawgs here.

I’ve been a baseball fan for most of my life. First, I was a Dodger fan, where I grew up in Long Beach, California. Then, I became a Minnesota Twins fan when I relocated to North Dakota. But I never attended a professional game in person. It was only when I discovered how much fun going to a baseball game could be that friends invited us to a minor league game, the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks at their home field.

The opening photo is a cellphone panorama featuring a game between the Redhawks and the Lincoln Saltdogs. Ignore the beautiful sky for a moment to note that the Redhawk in the white uniform is stealing second base. The Redhawks won the game 5-3. The Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks play in the American Association of Professional Baseball, which is an official Partner League of Major League Baseball, a minor league association not affiliated with MLB farm systems teams.

I sometimes take one of my Nikon cameras to a game to catch some of the action, and I often use the Continuous High shutter mode to capture multiple images of a play. In the Diptych above, the first image appears to show the ball beating the runner, a Sioux City Explorers player, to second base. However, the image on the left, captured one second later, shows the runner easily reaching the base as the second baseman for the Redhawks looks to left field, no doubt watching the ball fly past him as he missed the catch. The ball is apparently blocked from view by the Redhawk. The Explorers went on to win 5-4.

Hawkeye, the Redhawks’ mascot (left), is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Redhawks this year. He has been entertaining the crowd during pitcher changes and between innings since the team began. On the right, there’s a time-out while the Redhawks manager, Doug Simunic, is tossing the ball as he waits for the new pitcher to finish his walk from the bullpen. This dipytch is also from that game with the Explorers.

This photo set led me down a rabbit hole of AI conflicts, stemming from incomplete public records and some AI tools’ inability to access specific sites. I wanted to confirm details of this game, but I digress, so I’ll just leave it at that. The one thing I am sure of is that the game was played on April 2, 2012, documented by the image metadata. The Cactus League pits major league teams in exhibition games in the spring in fields spread around the Phoenix metro area.

The triptych illustrates the dive back to first base when a player must beat the ball to the base. The top left of the triptych shows the pitcher throwing the ball to first. It’s not easy to see unless you visit my Flickr site to view the enlarged photo, but the ball is the small white spot just visible beside the umpire’s left ear, approximately the same distance as the base runner’s elbow. The other two pictures show that the runner beat the first baseman’s tag. Both photos of the tag indicate the runner had his hand on the base before the tag, and he was called safe.

In early 2024, I was preparing for our trip to Africa and purchased a 200-500mm lens for the occasion. To get familiar with the lens, I thought I’d practice some fast-moving targets. As it happened, my grandson was participating in a track meet for his middle school team. Here’s my favorite photo from the shoot: a leap over the hurdle, and Owen being cheered on by a track coach.

I also found an archive of photos in our family collection that were never processed, featuring Owen at a hockey practice. Owen was eight years old then. At the time, they weren’t processed because they were seriously underexposed and noisy, due to an ISO 6400 setting and a high shutter speed used to stop the action. I attempted to process a couple of them, but the tools I had weren’t very effective at noise reduction. This triptych was processed using the latest version of Adobe Lightroom Classic’s Denoise feature, and exposure was adjusted with the new Adaptive Color setting. Owen is in a blue uniform at the top of each image except for the image in the upper left.

In 2015, we visited North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Bodie Island. One day, we discovered a public access to the beach, perfect for capturing the sunrise. A bonus was capturing these two surfers enjoying the cool October morning.

In January 2024, we spent a few days at a condo in Emerald Isle. On a cold, blustery day, no one was at the beach. No one, that is, except this brave windsurfer, who defied the high wind warnings, rough seas, and storms.

In May 2025, we visited Salt Pond Beach on Kauai. It was busy with swimmers, and I spotted the bright yellow and black wing of a windsurfer being lifted up by the strong wind.

In 2018, we decided it was time for us to visit a popular event in Scottsdale, Arizona. I don’t know much about horses, least of all those stately Arabians, but the event is a must-see for those who follow the breed. The competition has been attracting horse lovers since 1955, growing from a modest gathering of 50 horses to a world-class spectacle featuring nearly 2,000–2,400 Arabian and Half-Arabian horses. We spent the morning watching the judging as the horses were put through their exercises.

In January 2017, Lynn and I decided to attend the rodeo in Buckeye, Arizona. We’d heard about the show, and I thought it might be fun to capture some action shots. I came away with pictures from all of the events, but one of my favorite photos is of this calf roper in action.

Another of my favorite shots from this rodeo features a horse doing its best to throw the rider. As it turned out, this would be the last rodeo I photographed to this day. The following year, the rodeo was held indoors, and they didn’t allow “fancy cameras” unless the photographer paid an annual fee to the Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association. We put my camera in the car and attended the rodeo. There were many people taking cell phone photos and videos, but remembering all the beautiful images from the previous year, my heart wasn’t in it. After the rodeo, I looked online to see what I needed to get the license to participate with a “real” camera. At the time, the annual fee for a photographer’s license was $600, if I recall correctly.

That’s all for me in my response to Beth’s challenge. Beth, you made me work for this challenge. I reprocessed many of these images and put the baseball shots into small galleries. I had to relearn the technique in Photoshop, but now I can do it again for future challenges. If you’d like to take a closer look at the photos, especially the full-size images in the gallery shots or examine the metadata, you can find the series on my Flickr site here.

Last week, Sofia hosted the challenge with her take on looking back to a previous challenge featuring doors. Next week, Anne hosts the challenge, which will go live at noon Eastern Time on Saturday. Be sure to follow her site here so you don’t miss the challenge details. If you haven’t participated in the challenge but would like to get started, you can find the details here.

John Steiner