Sports photography tips

I have complied tips for being a better sports photographer from various online sites:

1- Know your subject- slow sport/fast/large field/small/where's the action going to happen?

2-Know your camera-You can't spend time with trial and error when shooting sports, because the action will have passed. 

3-Take good pictures-shutter priority/faster shutter speed will freeze the subject.

4-Don't just shoot the action, sometimes dramatic photos are found after the play or on the sidelines. 

5-Practice- the more you practice (just like in sports) the better you will be.

Goal- to combine a great moment, with great content and great emotion in a single shot.

Mike Orazzi

Found this guy on Flickr. He is a sports photographer who has also shot field hockey. Not normal high school field hockey, but he has images up from the NCAA D1 final four. Softball, track and field, tennis, baseball, lacrosse, golf, rodeo, volleyball, basketball, gymnastics, soccer, cheerleading, football, and wrestling. Wow, that is a lot of sports to be shooting. After looking through a lot of his work, I decided that I like the pictures with a lot of action that show the players' faces, and I like the ones with emotion and action together. Some of his pictures are great but could be improved if he shot from a different vantage point. One picture is of a soccer goalie who is diving to make a save. When Mike pressed the shutter, he got the goalie as he was 3 feet off the ground and horizontal. However, we see his feet and legs. The picture would be more impacting if it showed his face as his was making a last ditch effort dive. The ball got passed him. Anyway, I think that being a good sports photographer depends largely on being in the right place at the right time. And being ready to snap the shot of course.  

Robert Creamer

Artist who uses a flat bed scanner to create images of flowers and fauna. I watched the video of him working from his site, and his process includes setting up his flowers in a box with a black background to scan. He can preview the scan as many times as he wants until he is satisfied enough to make the scan. During his editing process, he tries not to manipulate his work too much. He said he doesn't want to focus of his work to be the editing, but the subject itself. When I first saw his work of flowers, I assumed they were photographs. I was surprised to learn that they were made using a scanner. I am realizing how much scanners are important and can be important tools in making photographic art. 

Mark Slankard

Body of work: curb appeal-mid-western suburban landscapes. "Curb Appeal" is intended to explore the problems and possibilities of suburban developments as a site of contention to expanding privatization and social withdrawal. His "Minor Invasions" work is fake dollhouses and scenes that are made to evoke sublimated fears and desires and explore tensions between childhood innocence and sadism. I think it is very interesting how he has sos much meaning behind his work. He doesn't shoot to shoot; he has a mission and he prepares what he needs to get his point across.

McKay Imaging

McKay Imaging is a photo company based in Red Bank, NJ.  Elizabeth and Robert McKay work together to shoot weddings, commercial, portraits, and performers. I am a fan of their work, and I am trying to get an internship with them this summer. They charge $3800 starting for wedding photography, and $395 starting for portraits. They also have a gallery in Red Bank that I have been to last summer. 

Jerry Uelsmann

He is an amazing photographer. I can't believe that he puts together his compositions all in the darkroom. They are so well meshed together; I am very interested to find out how he does it. "Jerry creates his work with film and darkroom techniques, but he in no way harbors any ill-thoughts on digital work. To him it is like painters who prefer to use different brushes." 

Maggie Taylor

Maggie Taylor is a digital artist who uses a flatbed scanner and vintage unclaimed photographs to make unique art. Her work is interesting and unusual. It isn't quite photography, but it has many photo elements. There are sometimes 3D objects in a 2D space. She paints many of her background. They look more like paintings to me personally, but I know that they are digital compositions. They are mostly 'impossibly' images. Even if that environment could exist, the subject matter is fantasy. She has done a body of work called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which is a play off of disney's movie. Maggie is married to Herry Uelsmann who is also a famous photographer. He is a master combination printer who uses multiple negatives and enlargers to make his darkroom work. He makes impossible images using the darkroom. 

Online Photo Storage

Everyone is like back up your work! Save to your jump drive and to Thawspace, burn CDs, etc. I am looking into online photo storage because Thawspace is not forever, CDs can't hold too much information, and I can't seem to figure out how to burn to DVDs which have more memory. Memory cards are very small and can be easy to lose. Burning CDs takes up physical space and also has the possiblilty of getting lost. Online storage sites: Flickr, photobucket, shutterfly, snapfish. hooray.com, fotki.com. Every online photo storing/sharing site is different. Some cost money each month, or just one flat rate, and some are free altogether.  Some offer a little storage, and others have unlimited. Some can save full resolution and others save 72 dpi. My favorite is Flickr because there are so many photos to browse, and most of them are very high grade work. I get ideas from there and learn from others. 

Rankin

Digital Photographer who lives in london. http://www.rankin.co.uk/bio.aspx. He does advertising, beauty, portraits, lingerie, covers, and fashion. His photographs are very digitally enhanced and manipulated. He shoots for advertising. Everything from Baileys, Cannon, Nike, Dove, Coke, Shampoos, water, sunglasses, clothing stores, BMW, and diamonds. He makes covers for many different magazines including Vogue, Esquire, GQ, Dazed, and playboy. I think his images are sharp and 'hip' like fresh. A lot of modeling and fashion, beauty shots for makeup probably. I like looking at how photography can be used for more than just art. Advertising. It is a way to make money, and I like that there are successful digital photographers in the advertising field. This is a field that interested me 3 years ago when I was first going to college. I took an advertising class and was going to major in that a well. I am happy with my major now, but I think it would be good to learn more about photography and advertising and how they go together in many instances. 

Aaron & Rosie Nace fotography

I found these two artists on flickr.com. I think they are amazing. The way they can digitally composite their own impossible images perfectly is something I strive to do. He puts himself in a lot of his work. I will talk about some of his self-portraits. 

-His face is a puzzle with many pieces, and his hand is holding the piece from center.

-The background is a patterned wall paper, his face is on top, and half of his face is flat and part of the wall. 

-His face with no eyes, nose, or mouth.

-Composite with many old fashion clocks and his torso.

-A remake of Frida kahlo with him in the center and a similar background.

-He has many movie posters with him in them. All very interesting.

Actually, he is in all of his work on his web site. In his blog, he said it gets old taking pictures of yourself.

Rosie is his partner on the website.

All of her photos are self-portraits too... I still like the images. They are for the majority like our assignment 2 with impossible images. They are really cool and realistic for being impossible. I def. am a fan.

http://www.nacedesign.com/index2.html 

Portfolio

I just printed out 14 images of field hockey sports photography! I have 2 more left, but they don't fit on the same page so I am waiting until I have something else to fit on the page so I don't waste any paper. Most of them are 7.5x11@300 dpi. Others are 10x10, and 4x7. I realized something pretty interesting. I started shooting for my portfolio the last weekend in March. When I came home to edit from that shoot, I saw a lot of pictures that I wanted to use; maybe 10. Then I shot the next 3 weekends, and the images from the first shoot didn't seem so great anymore. I think it's a good thing. Each weekend that I went to shoot, I think I got better because of my final portfolio pictures that I decided to choose, only 1 is from my first shoot. The number of pictures I choose to use gets larger as each shoot progressed. Therefore, I think I definitely improved each time I went out to shoot. (Also, I got a new 100-300mm lens for my birthday which helped). I took one shot of my field hockey net on So Sweet a Cat field a year ago that I want to find and use for my portfolio. Overall, I am really happy with the theme I choose because it is something I am really interested in, and I think I improved significantly. I am also happy that I stuck with just the sports of field hockey because it is much easier for each picture to relate to the other. If I shot other sport, it would be harder to make a cohesive body of work. Over the summer, I want to try shooting other sports (Surfing, swimming, biking) I also want to experiment with panning on a tripod. :)

Alfred Stieglitz

"Alfred Stieglitz is often called the father of modern photography because of his driving force in the fight to have photography recognized as an art form. Camera Work was one of the greatest accomplishments of Stieglitz in his mission to bring the level of photographic art in the United States up to the level of work being produced in England and Europe." He photographed clouds to demonstrate how to "hold a moment, how to record something so completely, that all who see will relieve an equivilant of what has been expressed." He was born in Hoboken, NJ in 1864. He is best known for the images, "Winter, Fifth Avenue" and "The Terminal," but after doing my project on clouds for assignment 3, I find his cloud studies very interesting. I like to high contrast between black and white in some of his images; and then he also has some that are full of midtones and very low contrast. The sun is in some pictures: siloetted, or sunlight coming in from the side. In others, there is no sun visable, but still light. I think that everyone has looked up at the sky at somepoint and has found some type of meaning in the clouds. Dark, storm clouds, rainy clouds, sunny, huge, small, cottony, wispy, bright, dull, different shapes and sizes. Some people can spend a lazy afternoon looking at the clouds and finding shapes and animals in them. I think that Stieglitz was a legacy in promoting photography in America. Currently, his cloud work is not for sale, but is priced between $55,000 and $65,000! wow, that's amazingly high for a photograph.

Photography Portfolio

I am interested in shooting sports photography. I love sports and I love photo, so I tried combining the two, and I really enjoyed it. So, I am doing a portfolio on sports photography. I wanted to push the action idea and possibly shoot 'still life' in sports. I was imagining close ups, b/w, macro, pattern, etc for this idea. Examples would be a pile of field hockey sticks with all different colors and logos. Another example is sports equipment close up in b/w. 

My next idea is just shooting emotion in sports. People celebrating after a home run, fans cheering, coaches yelling, dad teaching his son to catch, lifting massive amounts of weights, crying after a lose, exhaustion, and frustration. 

My last idea is a photo essay where I will photograph a single sport or possibly a single sporting events and show all aspects of the sport: emotion, action, still life. Strong opening image, throughout the game, and a strong closing image. 

I decided to pic the last idea. I like the other ones, but for my portfolio, I want to shoot just field hockey and try my best to get prime action shots, emotion, and still life. I have shot at 3 different tournaments so far, and I have one more to go this weekend. I have edited over 200 pictures and have 10 solid ones. I am finding that it is best to just shoot and eventually I will get a good one. Until I get better at this type of photography, I am just shooting as much as possible. I think my images from the first weekend up until last weekend did improve a little. I am excited to see these printed out. I will have possibly 3 different sizes. 10x10, 7.5x11, and 4x7. Some images have better quality and resolution than others; I need to balance them out.

Proj 3

For the next project I am doing #3 which is post print manipulation. In the past I have done a Polaroid manipulation where I heated up the picture with a hair blow dryer and  then took a golf tee to make swirls and textures on the print. So when I first heard about assignment 3, this is what I thought of...but we are printing on the epson printer on matte paper so I didn't know what to do. 2 weekends ago, on a drive home from temple, the sky was looking really amazing. So I took out my camera and took some pictures. When I was in class trying to think of something to do for assignment 3, I looked at my pictures of clouds that I had taken and decided what I was going to do. I printed out 4 large images of the sky and interesting clouds. 2 of the images where from that weekend, and the other 2 were from about a year ago. No I have the images printed and my post print manipulation is going to be painting with an acrylic medium glossy gel. On Thursday after I buy the gel, I am going to use a thick paint brush and I will make several layers of gel to create a texture that looks like the clouds. Hope it works out how I want it to.