Capturing the action

Know your sport.

Capturing the action in any sport is about anticipation. Knowing where the athletes will be, when they will be there and making sure you are ready for it when it happens.

The best way to do those things is to know what you are shooting. There isn't a sport shooter out there that doesn't benefit from knowing what they are shooting. I have shot a lot of combat sports and one of the things I look at is footwork. Their feet will tell you where their punches will go.

It is all about the moment

Sometimes we over think our photographs. We have an idea in our head, that a certain photograph will look a certain way and have a certain light but sometimes we have to break out of that shell and let the moment guide us.

This is straight flash on camera set to about -1 EV on the flash and focused on the eyes of the fighter. No fancy lights, not set up, no set position, I ran to the spot where I thought the picture would be and waited for it to happen and depressed the shutter button. Sometimes we work hard to get an image that is burning a hole in our brains and it doesn't look as good as we thought it would be.

Other times images happen in front of us and the look much more beautiful that we anticipate.

Diving into a photograph

Sometimes we get so caught up in cathing a moment or invoking some sort of emotion in a portrait or waiting for the right light we forget one of the most basic buidling blocks. Background. The best parts of a photograph may not be the foreground or main subject. Sometimes it can be the background.

I caught this diver as she came down a 10 foot dive trying to time the shot with the background of the Canadian Flag in the background. Without it I think it is a normal boring diving shot. With the background it gives it a little big of spice.

Telling the story

Sports Portrait - Shooting sports portraits can be an interesting endeavor. The challenge is shooting the athlete in an interesting way that hasn't been shot 1000 times before by every other newspaper/magazine photographer in every city in the world and doing it within deadline screaming in your ear.

It was at his home gym which was cool but like almost every other gym had a lot of background clutter and I didn't see a great spot to shoot into a clean background so I stopped down the background and made it black.

This Jordan, he is a young boxer who was going to step into the Golden Gloves competition. I made him take off his shirt and his pants, and change into boxing attire. The golden gloves competition was going to take place here for the first time in over a decade so it was kind of a big deal to make sure we told the right visual story. It is NOT a coincidence that his had wraps are golden in color.