Sports Photography Tips and Techniques

1. have it, you can still go a long way on the other seven elements.
2. Skill - This is something you can learn, like hitting a baseball. Or photography.
3. Knowledge - You need knowledge both of your craft and of the game you are photographing. You must know how your camera works inside and out. You must be able to control it to get it to do what you want it to do without thinking about it or having to refer to the manual. You must also know the sport you are going to shoot. Study the game. For instance, in baseball, if there is a
4. Introduction Sports photography is one of the few remaining pure forms of documentary photography. The moment happens and it is gone. You either capture it in an image or you don't. Unlike sports writers and television, still photographers don't have the luxury of instant replay.
5. Learning Sports Photography The best way to learn a subject is to completely immerse yourself in excellent examples of it, and to get out there and practice it by doing it. There are no substitutes for practice and experience.
   Look at sports magazines such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine every week. Check sports photography web sites such as Yahoo's Daily Sports Photos. Go to the bookstore and look at the many books in the sports section, some are by remarkable sports photographers like Walter Iooss. Subscribe to Robert Hanashiro's Sports Shooter. Look at what wins the sports categories in the Pictures of the Year contest. Look at your newspapers sport's section every day. My paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, also has sports photo galleries from most games. Other papers are starting to do the same. Read Rod Mar's sports photography blog "The Best Seat in the House".
6. Getting Started You simply have to start at the beginning, learn your craft, pay your dues, find your own level of talent, and work your way up.
   Go to little league games and practice with what equipment you have. Go to high school games and shoot. At some high schools you can find football, soccer, field hockey, baseball and softball all going on at the same time in the afternoon in the fall. Look for action and feature shots. See how good your knowledge of the game is, and how good your anticipation and reflexes are. Build up a portfolio that shows what you can do.
7. Eight Elements Necessary for Success
8. Talent - Natural talent is something you are born with. You either have it or you don't. If you don't runner on first base and the ball is hit in the gap, where will the play be? Hint - not at second base!
9. Practice - Photography is a physical as well as a mental skill. Practice will make you better at both. Skills improve dramatically with practice and atrophy with disuse.
10. Desire - Your philosophy and attitude will affect your work. When I go out to shoot a game, I want the great peak action moments, the ones with great content, and the ones with great emotion. I expect to get them. I get really mad when I don't. I'm greedy. I want it all and I expect to get it all. My goal is to combine a great moment, with great content and great emotion in a single picture in every game I cover.
11. Work - Make a commitment to excellence. Don't stand around picking your nose just because baseball is mostly boring. Shoot it like you would if you were playing the game. Concentrate on every pitch. Figure out the situation beforehand. If you are in left field and there is a runner on second, and the ball is hit to you, where are you supposed to throw it? Be in a "zone of your own" of concentration. Know the game situation and what's going to happen.
12. Opportunity - You can't always control what opportunities you have, but you have to seize them when then come along. I was in my last semester in college with only 11 credits left to graduate when I quit school to take a job as a photographer at a small suburban newspaper just outside of New Orleans. It was not even a job shooting sports full time, but it was a job that would not have been there when I graduated, and it was in a city where I wanted to live and work. It allowed me to get a start in the newspaper business, and opened up further opportunities for me once I had more experience. I finally went back to college about a decade later and finished up my degree.
13. Luck - Some say you can't control it, but it favors the prepared. On the other hand, sometimes being in the right place to get the best picture is strictly a matter of chance, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

1. Good News and Bad News First, the bad news. Your dream may be to be make your living shooting sports. The reality may be that you are just not good enough. This may be either as a photographer or as a business person. Because its not enough to just be a great photographer, you also have to be a good great business person. And even then, you still may not be able to make a living doing sports photography, or any other kind of photography. Things are changing profoundly in the business of photography. 

 

Photography Basics Light is a form of radiant energy that we can see with our eyes, and record with a camera. It is our primary method of obtaining information about the world. Light, in terms of its quantity, quality, and color, is also the most important thing that affects the technical quality of our sports pictures. Unfortunately, in most cases for sports action photography, there is not much we can do about any of these factors. We usually just have to work with what is there. In some cases we may be able to set up strobes to provide our own main sources of light, or use a strobe as a fill to supplement existing light.   Equipment- Snap shot digital cameras. DSLR cameras, Lenses Shooting Techniques 1. Master your craft and your e quipment. 2. Use your vision, see whats hapening no really see whats exactyly happening

Special Techniques Sometimes (nearly always) when we shoot high school basketball, we are shooting in gyms that are not very well lit. This can be a challenge. Available light exposures are problematic because they are usually relatively long and don't stop the action very well, and the quality of the light coming straight down in these gyms is extremely ugly. This leads to awful shadow detail on African-American players, and lots of noise in the image. Image Processing