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Matinee: 'The Sporting Life' Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

13 August 2022

Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?

So we're pleased to present the 461st in our series of Saturday matinees today: The Sporting Life.

This 3:04 video production presents the sport photography of Paul Dineen. There are two things to note about it. The subject is local sports not professional sports. And the second is that these are accomplished images by a guy who knows what he's doing even if he's just doing it for local softball games.

Both of those things speak to a certain enthusiasm and purity usually reserved for the amateur, whether athlete or photographer.

But Dineen's story isn't that simple.

Earlier this year Katie Roth told his story in a piece for the Fort Morgan Times. Fort Morgan in Colorado is one of the communities Dineen has plied his craft.

And, as she tells it, there have been a lot of them since Dineen fell in love with photography in 1986. After working for HP in California, Dineen moved to Colorado and picked up a digital camera. "From 1989 to 2016, he took thousands of photos at Fort Collins Foxes Baseball Club games and Rocky Mountain High School (Home of the Lobos) athletic events," she writes.

Then the Dineens moved to Morgan County where he went to 453 Fort Morgan, Brush, Wiggins, Weldon Valley, Prairie and youth sporting events with his camera.

He likes baseball best, he told Roth, because of "the variety of things you take pictures of -- swinging a bat, pitching a ball, running bases, diving for catches, sliding into bases."

And while he likes the images, what his likes best is the pleasure they will continue to give down through the years to the people he has photographed. "I like the idea that these pictures will be a longer-term thing where they can look back five or 10 years from now and my pictures can help them have good memories of their time playing sports," he said.

He's had 10,000 of his photos published in the six years he's lived in Fort Morgan. Among the publications graced by his work are the Fort Morgan Times, Brush-News Tribune, Otsportschek and most recently the Lost Creek Guide.

Despite being hampered by Parkinson's disease, Dineen only rarely misses a game, Roth reports.

Or a shot.


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