Freelance Jobs In Photography
For more help and dozens more selling photos ideas, check out the ebooks mentioned on our main page.
So let’s assume you’re in and you’ve gotten the nod to shoot your first sports assignment.
Sorry, those professional baseball, basketball and Big 10 college football games will be covered by the staff photographers because they’ll appear on the cover of the section.
Don’t despair, as you get better, you’ll get to the front page of the Sports section. If you have a really good picture, it may run on the front page, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet. So this will likely be the typical assignment you might get.
- High School football, basketball or volleyball
- Kick off, tip off (whatever the term is for the sport) 7 pm (earlier if you’re lucky, gives you more time to shoot)
- Coverage of Cougars’ season opener against Rams. (substitute names for your local high school mascots)
- Deadline for picture 8:45 pm
Preparations
Get to know the route to and from the stadium. Arrive early enough to figure out how long it will take to get to the nearest area where you have WiFi or an ethernet cable which you can plug into your laptop for internet access.
Grab a team lineup or roster for both teams. If you can’t get a copy to take with you, photograph the roster so that you can quickly bring that up for captioning when you’re editing. If you’re lucky, the Athletic Director of the school may make his office available for you. But let’s assume you have to drive to a Starbucks. Let’s say it will take you 5 mins.
That means you have to leave the stadium no later than 8 pm if they want one picture. You may be thinking that’s more than enough time. Don’t forget you have to set up your laptop which you should be "sleeping" and not turning on from a cold start. If you’re not going to be near AC power, make sure to charge up your laptop’s battery beforehand.
Be careful where you park
Be sure you are not going to be blocked by another vehicle because you will be leaving earlier than everyone else. This is also a safety issue. Have your gear ready to go once you arrive.
It’s not a good idea to be digging in your trunk. Opportunistic thieves will see this.
Watch your time.
As you gain experience, you can push those time limits more.
A lot depends on how much you shoot and how fast your laptop is. If you shoot too much and at too a high a jpeg resolution and if your computer is "older," it will slow you down. Large files take longer to download.
Those files will take Photoshop more time to open, render and save. A few seconds here and there may not seem like much, but over a 100 or 200 images, that will become significant.
The majority of professional sports photographers do not tweak their images very much. They check sharpness, dodge and burn, caption, crop, save and they transmit.
Don’t forget you will be sorting and deciding on one picture where you will need to identify all the players in it. So when you’re shooting, everytime you think you have a good action sequence, be sure to photograph the back of the jerseys of the players involved in the "play" to help you id them later.
Football and ice hockey players have an annoying knack of looking alike once they don their gear, or don’t you know that? If that never occurred to you, don’t feel bad. I made that mistake when I was a rookie. I ended up driving to the coach’s house with a wet print in hand at the eleventh hour. And mind you that was in the days when we shot film and made prints.
Shooting
- Expose well so that you don’t have to do much dodging and burning in Photoshop.
- Stealing a peek every now and then to see how the histogram looks is fine, but don’t make it a crutch.You might be draining your batteries or you might miss something you should be capturing in the camera.
- Keep track of your memory cards by numbering them so that you know what order they were used.
In photojournalism where deadlines are critical, the most recent pictures tend to be more important. Game winning plays andpost-game jubilationare such examples. Later, as you’re editing, you might find another player had a very good game with outstanding statistics, then go back and look for extraordinary images of that player.
Editing & Writing
Use the team roster
Open the picture you took earlier of the team rosters. Minimize it and keep that handy. You’ll be referring to that for correct spellings and jersey numbers.
Don’t sweat the color
Most photographers don’t try to fine-tune the color because they are not in the most "ideal" locations when working on their pictures.
Pick the picture you like
If you’re told they need only one picture, pick the one you like the most. Remember, the editors at the paper weren’t there. They may ask if you have this and that, but in the end, it 1ff8 ’s your name that goes underneath the picture.
You should feel good about your choice. In all my years at the paper, I lived by that motto. It has always worked for me. The trouble with giving in to what the editors want is this: they have a picture in mind and that’s a tainted, it’s not necessarily the best picture. You were there, only you can be the judge of that.
Identifying people
Whenever possible, identify people in your pictures left to right. Names with ages and the city they live in and other facts which might add to the picture. In the case of a soccer game, the name and the player’s position e.g AC Milan midfielder Ronaldinho (left) celebrates with teammate Kaka after scoring the equilizer in the dying minutes of the game against Barcelona.
There may be more to this but generally speaking, after you hit click the mouse to "Send" or the "Return" key to transmit your picture, you can relax. Call your supervisor/photo editor to make sure they receive it after a few minutes.
Author: Peter Phun
Mail this post
