The story of two photos, pure amazement and serendipity for me!

Monday night, December 26, the Trail Blazers played Philadelphia in our season opener. Fans and those whose employment depend upon the games taking place, as well as the players and coaches, feel pretty good about basketball being back in Portland.

Lots of Trail Blazer fans count #12, LaMarcus Aldridge, as their favorite player.

One of the photos in this short, short story is this one that I took from clean across the entire arena of LaMarcus Aldridge as he scored. Totally excited to get it!

When I decided to post the photo, I searched on Google for trail blazers philadelphia december 26, 2011. And I come across photos from the game taken by the Oregonian, Portland's daily newspaper. Lo and behold, the very first photo I saw is of the same instant of action, taken by the photographer (Bruce Ely) sitting on the floor at the baseline--you can barely see him on the right edge of my photo because I cropped close to LaMarcus and the basket. (More about that at the bottom of the post.)

If you click on the link, you'll see the second photo in this short, short story. And be amazed.

To tell you the truth, I did the search hoping to find the photo and a word or two about who had passed the ball to LaMarcus and if this was one of those lob passes like I'm pretty sure I remember it was. Anyway, the caption beneath Ely's photo was no help, but I was very excited to see the action from his perspective, let me tell you! Please click on the link above or here to see Ely's photo. I would have tried to copy and paste it onto the blog, but I didn't feel that would be the right thing to do. One of these days maybe I'll contact him for permission, if this happens again!


Here I've I cropped the photo differently so you could see Bruce Ely. Look at that other camera and lens standing in front of him!