 "Photo:")
Brian Toal sprinting straight at you on a football field is usually not a good thing.
If you find yourself in that unfortunate situation, you're most likely about to be on the receiving end of a punishing tackle or - if he's in fullback mode - a punishing blow on his way to a first down.
Now imagine that situation, except that you aren't wearing pads and are desperately fumbling to zoom out so you can fit his enormous body into a tiny frame.
Ahh yes, the life of a photographer.
When Heights photo editor Marc Deley - the Pharoah of Photo, as coined by layout editor Sonny Fabbri - offered me the chance to spend the second half of Saturday's Ball State game as a photographer on the sidelines, I had to jump at the chance.
I mean, how hard can it possibly be? I've been known to take all kinds of artsy shots with my nice little Kodak digital camera. Check my Webshots if you don't believe me.
On second thought, for my reputation's sake, don't check my Webshots.
Point. Click. Shoot. That's all it seems the pictures I see run next to my stories in The Heights ever take. I know a bit about football, so I figured I could pull it off: snap some shots of people flying through the air, breaking tackles, man-handling quarterbacks.
As you may have guessed, I was wrong.
Nearly being made into a human railroad track by Toal was really just the most dramatic of the many things that went wrong.
Hoping to survive the game without any broken equipment, our real photographers handed me what was the Geo Metro of lenses compared to their Hummer-esque models.
I felt like the second-grader playing T-Ball when all he wanted was to join the big boys playing real baseball on the next field over.
But my Geo Metro model was all my amateur skills could handle. I spent a good 10 minutes or so just figuring out the zoom, how to get it to focus, and other basic tasks. The other photographers must have been straining to hold in their laughter.
After I figured out how the dang thing worked, then came the actual hard part: getting a shot that was any good. As a photographer, your mind has to move at twice the speed of the game. Sadly, mine couldn't quite keep up.
"OK, there's the QB ... wait, he handed it off ... no play-action ... OK, Kiwi's got him ... click ... oops, didn't get him ... alright, throwing down the field ... find the receiver ... got him, wait, nope wrong receiver."
Needless to say, my head was spinning.
My big moment - or might we say, near big moment - came in the third quarter on Will Blackmon's acrobatic near-touchdown.
All the other "professionals" had gone behind the end zone - apparently the "logical" place to be at that point. Using my innate knack for picture-taking instead, I stayed planted in my spot around the 5-yard line. And sure enough, Blackmon skies for the catch and guess who's the only one with a face-on shot? Yours truly.
So why isn't it the spotlight shot on the front page today? Well, there was the small problem of me cutting out half of his body.
Sadly, my shining moment wasn't quite as glorious as it could have been.
Most of the rest of my time was fairly uneventful - until the encounter with Toal, which we'll get to in a second.
At one point I stopped to take a picture of a couple players standing on the sidelines and inadvertently caught Tom O'Brien as he walked by in the background, deep in thought about the next play he was going to call.
Maybe I really do have a knack for this stuff. Well, probably not.
But back to Toal. On his 13-yard run in the third quarter, I was accidentally in perfect position yet again.
As he broke to the outside, I frantically snapped pictures of him breaking tackles until I suddenly realized he was quickly getting closer.
And closer.
And closer.
Showcasing my dedication to the craft, I stood my ground - praying for my life as I kept the lens pointed straight at the large mass hurtling toward me.
At the last second, I looked up from my camera. I swear Toal and I made eye-contact for a brief second while he sprinted past, as if to say "Yep, I know I could have pancaked you right there, but I'll let you go this time."
Happy that I escaped the encounter without injury or peeing my pants - not to mention being featured on SportsCenter as the puny camera guy that got smashed - I went on to shoot the rest of the uneventful game.
Did I get a single decent picture? Debatable.
Will you find me back on the sideline snapping pictures? If they let me.
Will I be on the sidelines without pads next time? Not a chance.
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