2. Getting Started

You’ll learn about all of these aspects of sports photography throughout this chapter and the book. Although the learning curve initially sounds intimidating, the skills you need to achieve your goals are approachable and can easily be learned.

Simple as it sounds, practice and hard work are the key ingredients to success as a sports photographer. So much of what is necessary to make great sports images is having the knowledge to anticipate the action. Thereafter, timing and reflexes take over. Practice, quite literally, makes perfect.

Learning to see is a combination of inherent talent, personal discipline, and passion for the subject. Learning to run the camera is similar to how athletes learn the games bit by bit, beginning as children and mastering the mechanics and the strategies as they grow.

The technical parts of the process are not as difficult as they initially might seem. Running the camera is basically simple math. Each camera has advantages and liabilities. You need to learn and understand how to use them to your advantage. There is no secret formula for making great images, but there are a lot of guidelines and techniques that can help.

The toughest skill to learn is how to critique your own work accurately. If you are too easy on yourself, you won’t grow. If you are too hard on yourself, you can stifle your own growth.

Learning to see is the first step and involves a few essential components: recognizing what is important to include and what is necessary to exclude in terms of subject matter, deciding what looks attractive, and combining these elements to tell the story in the best way.

These are all ways of rendering action images. But you first need to decide how you want to render the action and then use the appropriate technique.

A faster shutter speed is necessary to stop action moving parallel to the camera. The closer the subject is to the lens as it moves parallel to the front of the lens, the faster the shutter speed will need to be to freeze the action.

Movement captured, especially with a long lens, as it moves directly toward the camera can be frozen with a significantly slower shutter speed.

By setting the camera to rear curtain sync, you can do a pan and fire the flash while panning. This will illuminate the subject and help freeze the motion.

Each sport has different, important considerations relative to how to capture the various forms of action, and these will be discussed in later chapters.

Aperture is also an important part of focus considerations. How much of the image do you want in focus? The larger the opening of the aperture (lower numbers enlarge the opening), the less that will be in focus—every time with every lens. With longer lenses you can see the change in depth of field faster, but the same rules apply for wide-angle lenses as well.

I always want very tight control over the technical part of the photographic process. I want every camera set to very tight technical tolerances. This is particularly important when I’m using multiple cameras (remotes) to capture images simultaneously. It helps with quality control, and that not only makes the images better but allows me to work much faster on deadline because I spend very little time in postproduction.

Depth of field is the amount of the image that is in sharp focus, from the nearest to the farthest element in the image. Three factors control this critical part of composition:

• Aperture. The wider the aperture, the smaller the amount of the image that will be in focus.

• Distance from the lens to the subject. The closer to the lens the subject is, the smaller the amount of the image that will be in focus.

• Lens length. The longer the lens is, the smaller the amount of the image that will be in focus.

The combination of these three elements controls the amount of the image that will be in focus.

Monopods are a must when you’re shooting sports. For many major sports, access is tightly regulated, and for security reasons, tripods are not allowed. I always have either a Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 or 600mm f/4 over my shoulder with a Gitzo Series 5 6X monopod with G-lock. It is big and strong but lightweight at the same time. It gives me better control over composition and stability, which is important when I’m using telephoto lenses. Having a long lens helps me get close to the action without physically putting myself in the middle of the action.

For the release of the Nikon D4, I photographed Kara Patterson, the USATF National Champion in women’s javelin at the time, to demonstrate various camera functions (Figure 2.3). For the shoot, Kara acted as a model. She stood where I asked her to stand and threw where I asked her to throw. This situation is similar to a portrait because I had control over access and timing.

Sports photography isn’t just about big events. But when I am covering big events, often my goal is to tell a specific story about a team or athlete. Many of my favorite images do not include major athletes and were not taken at major events. Finding lower-profile stories generally allows for greater access to subjects, and better access usually allows for better photos.

One of my favorite sports stories, shot at Arthur High School in Arthur, Nebraska, is about a six-man football team—the Arthur Wolves (Figure 2.4). It wasn’t fancy. It was just a simple story about the love of football and community.

Arthur is deep in the sand hills of western Nebraska. The population of the town is 145 people, and the high school consisted of 28 students that year. Every boy but one was on the football team, and the quarterback also played in the band. I was in town for homecoming week and the story ran in SI for Kids (Figure 2.5 and Figure 2.6).

Stories similar to the one I shot in Arthur are everywhere. People do seek me out if they have a story they think Sports Illustrated should feature, but most often I find stories on my own. Community calendars are extremely helpful in this regard. In fact, I covered a frog jumping festival in Ohio after picking up a community calendar in the Cincinnati airport (Figure 2.7).

Internet search engines are also a good place to look for local events. In the summer of 2010, I wanted to find something fun to run on SI.com and in the digital edition of Sports Illustrated before football season started. I was fortunate to find a watermelon festival in Georgia, just a couple hours from my home in Jacksonville (Figure 2.8). SI.com and digital publishing in general have provided me with many more opportunities to show my work.

Often, great stories are right in your backyard. Five years ago I met a 12-year-old local skater named Cason Kirk. We did a story on skateboarding at the famous Kona Skate Park in Jacksonville, Florida. Since then, I’ve had the joy of watching Cason grow into one of the world’s best young skaters (Figure 2.9).

Events and stories like these are fun to shoot and generally allow a lot of access, which brings us to the next important subject.

Every situation will be slightly different, and it is very important to ask the right questions. If you don’t, you won’t be prepared and you’ll make costly mistakes, which will put you and those around you at risk. Here are a few questions I ask in every situation:

• What can and can’t I do?

• Where can I physically be?

• What can I use the images for?

Features, the action away from the action, is another very important element of sports photography. These images define the culture of the sport.

Whether a portrait is environmental, showing the person you are photographing in a setting that helps define who they are, is action based, or is against a backdrop, proper lighting is critical when you’re shooting a portrait.

Candace is strong and powerful but also graceful and elegant at the same time. To show this, I wanted the light to accentuate her beauty and her body to emphasize her strength. I lit this portrait with two Elinchrome 2400 watt/second strobe heads and softened that light with two large Elinchrome octabox light diffusers. I stacked the lights—one at 10 feet above the ground and one at 18 feet—using huge Avenger light stands.

Candace was jumping on a trampoline and palming the ball effortlessly. I waited for sunset so that the orange and blue sky would complement her uniform colors and make a lovely image. By pumping in a lot of light, I was able to make the sky go a little darker and make her stand out.

To do this, I put gymnastic pads on the floor, stretched out flat on my back, and let Jevon jump over me. To keep it simple and to make sure Jevon was the only focus of the photo, I shot him against a pure white backdrop in a sound stage.

Because he needed to be moving very fast in close proximity to me, I decided to shoot him with a wide-angle lens. That meant I needed to be able to shoot at a fast shutter speed, even with strobe, in order to freeze the action.

Repeat the exercise on an inanimate object. This time take five pictures from two feet away using different aperture settings, from the widest to the narrowest aperture your lens allows. Then do the same thing from ten feet away. Compare the differences.

Being able to know how to use depth of field to predict what will be in focus in your compositions is a major part of being able to control your photographic vision.

Share your results with the book’s Flickr group!

Join the group here: flickr.com/groups/sportsphotographyfromsnapshotstogreatshots.