I got an internship! This semester, I am shooting athletic events for Winona State University and shot my first event earlier this month for the women’s gymnastics team. Today’s post will walk you through my general Prep, Shoot, Edit model for athletic events, from gaining press clearance to editing high-volume albums.
Prep
When shooting athletic events, there are two big regulations to know about. First, is if you’re allowed to be on the field at all. For a collegiate event like this, my clearance through Winona State allowed me to be on the gym floor where only athletes and officials are typically allowed. My manager and I discussed exactly where and when I was allowed to be on the floor before I went out. Asking questions about where you are and aren’t allowed is super important, both for the safety of everyone involved and your reputation as a photographer.
Second is sport-specific rules. As soon as I learned that I would be shooting a gymnastics meet, I began researching USA Gymnastics rules about photography and media. Although I was allowed on the floor, I had to be a certain distance away from all landing areas at specific times during the meet. I also spent time learning about the flow of a gymnastics meet with multiple events, which is very different from the linear progression of, say, a football game.
Shoot
Cheesy as it sounds, I like to say that photography, or at least my photography, is an act of love. In other words, I am a photographer because I love creating art, but mostly because I love capturing beautiful moments for other people. As sports photographers, the most important thing for us to remember is that we are servants of our athletes. We are privileged to be allowed to capture sometimes very vulnerable moments of people doing what they love and what they are good at. It can be so easy to get wrapped up in getting a ‘good’ photo during a really high-intensity event that we forget about the people in front of our lenses. As members of the media, we photograph for our athletes and our audiences first, not ourselves.
Something really beautiful that comes with being a sports photographer is the relationship you can build between yourself and the athletes, even over the course of a single event. I do this by focusing on three big things while I shoot:
First, clean action shots. As an athlete myself, I know that just because a picture depicts someone clearly and in action, doesn’t mean the photograph is good. When I shoot, I look for my own technique as well as the athletes’, and always try to capture them from angles that highlight the athleticism they display.
For example, in this uneven bars photo, the athlete’s feet are pointed, she has really good form. A photo like this is going to be better than a really cool mid-air photo with poor form. The key is to remember that what looks good to the athlete and makes them feel powerful is more important than what instinctively looks good to me.
Edit
I take hundreds of photos at athletic meets, and getting through all those can be tedious. I use two main techniques for editing huge volumes of photos.
The first is the pick-and-pull method. Rather than going through my SD cards and deleting photos that I don’t like, I pull out the photos I do like and want to edit. This is going to give me a lot fewer repeat photos and help me to only spend time editing the best photos of the event.
To choose which photos get pulled, I use a method explained by BYU photographer Nate Edwards. Edwards splits action photos into three categories: Anticipatory, Peak, and Reaction. In other words, the beginning of the movement, the top of the movement, and the end of the movement. Categorizing fifteen photos of the same action into these three groups helps to identify which of the photos best captures the moment. Take a look at this example: Here, we have three photos of three different points in a routine, each with an incredibly different mood.
Again, remember that we are photographers for the athletes first; the most technically impressive photo might not actually be the one that best captures the essence of a moment.
I had so much fun shooting this meet for the Winona State Warriors. This is just a general overview of how I approach sporting events, for more detail about how I use the Prep, Shoot, Edit workflow for portrait shoots, check out this post on my 1989 (Taylor’s Version)Inspired photoshoot. For more behind-the-scenes of my photography, check out my Instagram. Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!
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