Greetings...
I spent the last 3 months working as a sports stringer for the Hickory Daily Record newspaper. A large majority of my assignments were covering Friday nigh high school football games. The experience was great and I learned a lot and met many interesting people during this time.
The Photos
The Friday night package assignment usually consisted of 6 photos. The primary photo was an obviously an action shot from the game itself. The 2nd shot in the series was called a 'feature' shot that showed some form of people doing something at the game other than the athletes. The third shot is a simple mug shot of a fan with a brief interview to accompany the photo. The final 3 shots in the package were squares that could be just about anything going on at the game, including the athletes.
The most rewarding part of the experience for me was definitely the direct interaction with the people I photogrpahed for the non-sports shots. I met a lot of great people and heard many good stories from them as well. I visited some of these schools more than once and I ended up going to one stadium four times during the season. Some of the people got to know me from the repeat visits to their home field. The only bad part about this was that they were usually seeking me out trying to get thier photos in the paper. I usually had to turn them down, but they seemed to understand the nature of my visit :)
On the photograpic side of this learning experience, I learned even more.
For photographic assignments of this nature, you can generally throw out everything you know about artistic photography EXCEPT good composition. Sometimes, the composition doesn't even matter. Every photo I shot was a 2x3 ratio photo and the space available for the images in the newspaper were rarely this shape. I couldn't depend on my own composition to actually make the printed page. The graphics designers often had to modify my composition to make the image fit the space.
Getting good exposures is also a completely new experience. At the beginning of the season, I usually had some amount of daylight left at the beginning of the games, but it did not last long. As the season progressed, it was dark at the beginning of each game. Shooting natural light shots was usually NOT a good idea in any case. I learned quickly to fire my flash on just about every photo. The Canon 550ex performed extremely well for me all season. A large majority of the photos I shot (non action photos) were shot in program or fully automatic mode with the flash. After I learned that 'fine art' was not the goal, life got a little easier. My assignment was to capture sports action and people. The people/feature photos sell a lot of newspapers.
The sports action work was even more difficult. It actually took me just about the entire season to come up with a standard 'method' that worked well... and I still am not fully comfortable with autofocus methods for sports action yet. After I had tried everything, I finally started shooting in manual mode, setting my aperture at f/2.8, shutter at 1/200", ISO 800, and flash set to fire -2/3 to -1 stop under. I also generally used AI Servo Focus. Earlier in the season, I was shooting in aperture priority at f/2.8 at ISO 1600 (usually) and using the flash at -1 and setting the exposure compensation to -1. In aperture priority mode, I could not usually depend on my shutter speed to stay fast enough to successfully stop action. I would see my shutter speeds float between 1/60" and 1/250" in this situation. After evaluating all my photos, I determined that 1/160" and 1/200" were the best speeds to use. This PHOTO shows an example of where my shutter speed fell below par by accident from shooting in aperture priority mode. This particular shot was sharp where I needed it to be though and it showed good action, but it was purely by luck that this photo actually worked for the assignment.
My sports action photos can't ever look like the quality produced by the big-wig AP photographers, and I have realized that for several reasons. The main reason is that I can't afford the lenses they use. They most often use 300mm f/2.8 and longer lenses. I can't isolate my subject from the environments as well at 200mm @ f/2.8. After looking at a lot of high-end sports photography on sites like //www.sportsshooter.com, I also determined that most of the portfolios from these people are filled with photos that are shot in significantly better lighting situations than I'll ever get to work in. High school football stadiums are usually low budget lighting :) The basketball gyms I have been in so far are as bad or even more poorly lit than outdoor football stadiums, if you can believe that. So basically, its an equipment barrier for me at this point.
At any rate... I have learned a lot and enjoyed the experience. I have no desire to be a sports photographer, but the experience is worth the work.
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