Let me first start off by telling you a little bit about me! My name is Courtney Phillips. I am a small town girl from upstate New York. I am 22-years-old, I go to college at Suny Adirondack. At Suny Adirondack, I am a photography major. I have loved photography my entire life. So when I was asked to do this, I automatically said of course! I knew it was going to be a great experience and a good learning one at that.
Never in a million years did I think I would have ever gotten this opportunity to work with such an amazing group of people! This experience has been completely life changing, I have learned so many new things! Yes hockey season is my favourite season and I thought I had a little bit of a clue what goes on behind the scenes and the stats and all that fun stuff….but man was I wrong.
I had absolutely NO CLUE what was being talked about with my team of great guys. Most of the time, I would just sit here open the messages and not reply at first. Then just then…I started to catch on and that’s when the conversations started to get good!
I would like to just give a few different shoutouts to a few people. First, I want to start out by thanking the Adirondack Thunder organization for allowing me to take photos of the team. I then want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, Armand Klisivitch for allowing me to be his personal photographer for The Puck Authority page. About halfway through the season, he reached out to me knowing that I love photography and he wanted to give me this amazing opportunity.
He never once doubted my skills, knowing I had never done anything like this before. I had never shot sports photography in my life like this, but I quickly learned with a little help along the way. I also want to give a huge shoutout to Justin Levine for answering every single question I had this season and let me tell you it was a lot, but he also understood that I had no clue what I was doing and I was going to have some questions.
I am sad to say our season got cut short this year due to the COVID-19 virus, but that won’t be stopping me from planning to meet up with two of the most important guys that have helped me through this season for the 2020 NHL Draft in Montreal.
Let’s just talk about my plans for the upcoming year. I, as a photographer, need to go to the arena a little bit earlier to mess around with the camera settings against the lighting. Next season, I plan to work harder to make my photos come out better than this season.
My photos this season, don’t get me wrong, were pretty good, but I know they could use some improvements and that’s what I plan to do next season. Also, one other thing I would love to do next season is take a couple of road trips to some of the games and shoot in different arenas.