Adirondack Thunder
Adirondack Thunder
Friday, January 24th, 2020 - W 5-3 over Brampton Beast
On Friday, January 24th, a friend of mine, Andy Camp, invited me to photograph our local ECHL hockey team, the Adirondack Thunder. Andy is their official photographer, providing coverage for all home games and other marketing materials. Please take a moment after reading this to view his website and check out his work here. Andy is a great guy and I am very fortunate to have been afforded this opportunity by him. Huge thank you to him, and the Thunder organization.
The Adirondack Thunder are an affiliate of the New Jersey Devils NHL team and the Binghamton Devils in the AHL. You can find more info about them here. Their home rink is the Cool Insuring Arena located in downtown Glens Falls, NY, as many of you reading this are already familiar. On this particular Friday, the Thunder took home a 5-3 victory against the Brampton Beast from Brampton, Ontario. The Beast are an affiliate of the Ottawa Senators NHL team and the AHL’s Belleville Senators.
Glens Falls has seen a lot of semi-professional hockey teams over the years, and my earliest memories of hockey here go back to the Adirondack Red Wings, an AHL team that was affiliated with the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings - a team I still follow to this day. The Adirondack Red Wings spent their entire 20 year membership calling the civic center (now Cool Insuring Arena) home before being folded by their NHL affiliate in 1999. If you’re interested in more history, FunWhileItLasted.net has a good write up here.
The civic center has been home to several other AHL and ECHL teams in the post-Red Wings years, and games have always been entertaining. As an avid photographer, I always watched for the people covering the games and wondered who I needed to know to be one of them. Given that my specialty isn’t sports (though I have been known to shoot sports on occasion) I never took steps to pursue the chance to cover games in any official capacity, resorting to nabbing a few shots on the sly with some camera or another I had borrowed for review when I worked at a camera store. And mostly, that scratched the itch. Enter Andy Camp.
Andy Camp cleans the glass during a stop in play to clean up the ice.
I met Andy recently through a continuing education class at SUNY Adirondack, and both being photographers with backgrounds in graphic design, we mutually admired each others work. After class concluded, Andy offered to let me tag along while he photographed the Thunder. Naturally I jumped on the opportunity. It was great fun shooting hockey, and opportunities like this help keep the medium fun amidst pursuing paid work. I’ll shut up now and let the images do the talking. Please enjoy the rest of this post and thank you for reading.
Obligatory zamboni.