The Story Behind The Photos

Over the past two years you may have noticed a recurring credit under some of the photographs in the sports section of the Garden City News that reads "Newsphoto.com." The Web site and the photos are the product of Phillip and Lauren Davies. The husband and wife team work and reside in Garden City. News and sports photography are not new ventures for the Davies. Phil was a staff photographer at Newsday for 14 years, where he met his wife Lauren who was his boss and worked as a sports photo editor at the paper. The two eventually left Newsday in the late 90's and went on to other ventures that were unrelated to photojournalism.

Then, in early October of 2005, photojournalism once again beckoned. Mr. Davies recalls that this all started when his wife volunteered his services as the photographer for their son's soccer team. "Lauren knows that I enjoy photography and she wanted to get back into the field as well, so she went over to Neptune Photo on 7th Street and came home with a professional quality digital camera and a used zoom lens.

We then started shooting all of our son's soccer games. One thing led to another and soon we were submitting stories and photos to the Garden City News as well as listing all of the photos from each game we shot, for sale, on the Web."

Newsphoto has expanded over the past two years and now covers many of the sporting events at Garden City High School as well as many of their playoff games. Mr. Davies attributes the popularity of the Newsphoto Web site to word of mouth within the Garden City community as well as their weekly coverage of sporting events that appear in the Garden City News.

The site now has an active, online, archive of over 56,000 photographs from just the past two years of shooting in Garden City. "People don't realize that we may shoot over 1000 photos at a single game." said Lauren Davies. "We then review and edit every single image we take, publishing only the best photos from each event we cover. It's a huge amount of work, but we take a great deal of pride in the quality of the photos we publish." The Web site continues to grow in popularity and had a record 32,000 page views in one day, following their coverage of the Nassau county lacrosse semifinals at Hofstra University last Friday.

With the end of the 2006 - 2007 High School sports season just a few weeks away, the Davies want to thank the parents and students who have supported their efforts over the past year. From June 1st through June 8th 2007, every photo purchased from the Newsphoto.com Web site will get a second print of the same size and image for free. As an example, if a customer purchases a 20" X 30" custom poster, they will receive a second poster of the same image at no extra charge. If you have any questions about Newsphoto or you would like to schedule photo coverage for an upcoming sporting event in Garden City or anywhere on Long Island, drop an email to Lauren Davies at Lauren@newsphoto.com or visit www.Newsphoto.com