College Sports Information Directors of America

by Barb Kowal — College Sports Communicators, Director of Professional Development and External Affairs

Contributors and their 2023 Creative and Digital Design Contest national honors:
Lamar Carter – New Jersey Institute of Technology, Assistant Media Relations and Digital Strategy Officer, who placed third nationally in the Photograhy Portfolio of the Year – University Division.
Ryan Prickett – Fort Hays State, Sports Information Director, whose work was rated top Photography Portfolio of the Year in the College Division.
Johnny Smiley – University of Oklahoma Director / Creative Content, who earned numerous national honors in the CSC contest for his photography, infographics and motion graphics.

Sports photography as an art form is a never-ending process of learning. It is a combination of technical skills, ideas and creativity.

As the new academic and athletic year is upon us, several CSC members who earned national acclaim for their photography work in the 2023 Creative and Digital Design Contest contributed their thoughts on photography strategies and advice.

See their thoughts on: capturing great emotion and the atmosphere in their photography; the use of different lenses; shooting action sequences; shooting night photography; along with general tips for SIDs to develop more skills in photography and editing.

You can find numerous advice videos on YouTube or articles on sports photography. Here are some things to remember when shooting sports photos … and keep practicing!

1. Invest in the right equipment and gear.

For good sports photos, it helps to have a DSLR camera. You need an optical viewfinder so you can track the action; you should be able to shoot at 6 to 7 frames per second (fps) or more. Focus speed is just as important, as your subjects are going to be in motion. For the same reason, you want as little shutter lag as possible- have the shutter to open the instant you trigger it.

Also important — battery life and continuous buffering. Check batteries. You don’t want your camera to die out during the game. And, you don’t want the camera to start buffering in the middle of a play because you shot too many photos too early. Look for a camera that can continuously shoot for several shots before it has to buffer.

Try using a monopod to help you keep the camera steady and get the clearest sports photo shots. With a monopod you can practice panning photography, capturing a moving object while leaving the surrounding scene blurred to convey motion.

2. Get to know your camera and its settings.

Shutter speed is an important camera setting when you’re trying to capture motion. A fast shutter speed is ideal for freezing motion, which is typical for capturing action shots.

Equipping yourself with camera lenses of varying focal lengths is helpful for photographing live sports. You may need a zoom lens to get closer to the action.

Experiment with depth of field to capture different types of movement. To blur the background and pull a single subject into focus, try a small f-stop, which opens the aperture of your camera wide. Or you can go the opposite route to capture more of the scene around the athlete.

3. Use auto white balance.

Use your camera's auto white balance to reproduce accurate tones and colors. Whether you're shooting a game in the daytime or at night, it's best to use your AWB and let your camera automatically adjust as the light changes. Using AWB also frees you up to concentrate on composition and anticipating the key moments.

4. Don’t just look at the players and find different angles.

Try turning your camera towards the fans and the sidelines to capture reactions, to zoom in on the players' expressions and team moments off the field or court.

Maybe you could lie on the ground and shoot from a low angle? Or get a symmetrical composition of the players from somewhere up high? Often, shooting from the side of a court or field is better than being behind the goal or baseline shots.

5. Freeze the action with fast shutter speeds

The goal of all sports photographers is to freeze the action in dramatic moments, and the only way you'll do this is to shoot at fast shutter speeds. Ideally, you will want to shoot around 1/1000sec, but certainly not slower than 1/500sec. Always refer to your mode dial and change the exposure mode to Shutter Priority TV (time-value mode), to allow you to dial in your desired shutter speed. Your camera will then set the aperture and ISO accordingly to guarantee your speed.

How do you best capture emotion in your photos? How do you "tell the story" with your photographs? How do you set up for the shot? How important is planning your shooting positions? 

Smiley: I am always looking for emotion in my shots. For instance, in softball – I don’t want to take the same (easy) photos of our athletes pitching or hitting or infielders setting up in their defensive stances. Frankly, these always look the same game to game. In this sport and others, the student-athletes are always hyped. I’ll go and sit behind home plate, get the celebration of a batter getting on base, etc. It’s my job as the photographer to show them being emotional to make our viewers and fans get emotional about following them.

Moving to basketball, I’m always looking for emotion as it doesn’t happen as much as it does in softball. I like shooting from the stands, as you can see what’s going on and get heightened shots. If you position yourself on the baseline, be in decent spot to capture a dunk or a three-pointer. When you have a big play, look toward the bench with your lens to get the players and coaches celebrating.

For football: Shooting is so different because guys are wearing a suit of armor! Try to get the off-play shots: the captains’ walkouts, the coin toss. Shoot back to the crowd, with wide shots, showing 10,000, 70,000 in the background when the captains walk out. Show the atmosphere of college football.

Carter: First and foremost with sports, I try to shoot for reporting before looking for flair. This means: making sure subjects are in focus, with their ball/equipment in the frame, and in action/athletic poses. This is my priority for the myriad of usages we have for game photos; then, I can work to take chances and experiment a bit. Get what you need, then go for what you want!

The best way(s) to capture emotion for me are to follow a play through the end of a celebration and to look for in between moments that aren't happening directly in the flow of action (benches, huddles, etc). I get to "tell the story" of a game much in the same way as looking for emotion — by trying to capture as many people/areas/interactions as possible and not being afraid to change positions. Sometimes, you can get a great shot by going up to a catwalk or getting low in a huddle.

Also, plan ahead, especially for any sport you're not as well-versed in shooting. If you are shooting a cross country meet, be there early enough to get a course map and plan where you want to be and when to move. Know your team's style of play, too. (Example: if your top women’s basketball player is a lefty, it’s important to make sure you get shots from the side that'll keep her face clear from her shooting hand.)

Prickett: The way to capture emotion or the perfect point of action in your photos is being good at anticipating when the subject you are shooting is going to make the move or action. 

1. What helps me is just being a good student of several sports, knowing the X’s and O’s of what is going on in front of you…almost as if you’re a coach breaking down the game or an athlete trying to read a play and what your teammates are doing around you. You put yourself mentally in the action going on in front of you, as if you are that person trying to make a play. 

2. Learn players’ tendencies, mannerisms, and movements. You can see a lot by reading eyes and body language, which allows you to strike right at the perfect moment with your camera. Good anticipation is a great skill to have. Having a good internal clock of knowing or feeling right when the moment will happen in front of your lens is very helpful.

3. Set yourself in good positions to be able to read what is going on in front of you. Be willing to move around to create different looks and angles if a sport allows you the freedom to do so. For examples of sports, in volleyball I might shoot from baseline, sideline, or even high angles. Our home venue has an upper level, so it gives me a variety of angles to shoot from. For soccer, I work myself around the entire pitch to get several different angles and players instead of staying glued to one sideline. For softball/baseball, I work from dugout to dugout, and sometimes in the dugout with my team.

Can you give advice on how to best shoot night sports photography?

Prickett: Night photography is definitely a challenge. Two crucial things: 1. Make sure your lens has a low enough aperture (low F stop number) to bring enough light in, allowing the lens to work faster. Anywhere from 1.4 to 2.8 at night is ideal. 2. The other factor is having a camera of high enough quality that can reach the quick shutter speed and a higher ISO sometimes needed to get a good shot in low light. 

A lot of it comes down to understanding the photography triad of how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO work in tandem. You don’t have to have the world’s most expensive equipment if you do enough homework to understand what will still get the job done in low light environments.

Carter: Try to get the fastest lenses you can (example: lenses with single aperture numbers, like a 70-200 f/2.8) so you can let in as much light as possible when there isn't much. If you have to work with a less than ideal lens, work to keep your aperture low first, then see how much you can bring down your shutter without sacrificing freezing action - and then look to how much you can raise your ISO without adding too much grain to your images.

Advice on how to best use a zoom lens or wide-angle lens?

Carter: If you have access to two camera bodies, put one on each, but if not, just keep the other near the one in use and understand when to make switches. Wide angle lenses are good for huddles, starting lineups, postgame celebrations and group shots, while zooms tend to be best during action so you can work your way closer and further away as needed.

Since you will have hundreds of photos from an event, what is your method of editing your photos after shooting? Do you do it at halftime? As you shoot? Post-game?

Carter: I try my best to get my settings as right as possible in camera so when I send photos to my colleagues (say for a score graphic), the most they need to do is maybe a brightness bump. My most active workflow is usually in basketball, where I'm lead photog but not one of the primary SIDs for either sport. I'll mark photos here and there during the game that I want to send out or I'll get suggestions from my colleagues on who they need based on play. I'll either wirelessly pull photos (camera connected to phone) and put those in a Google Drive, dump photos on my laptop and cull down at halftime to upload some for usage, or both. 

For fast sorting, I use Photo Mechanic which is the pro industry standard for sorting, adding photo information, etc. and it's just blazingly fast to use to go through hundreds or thousands of photos in real time. They have significant educational license discounts for lifetime licenses so I highly recommend grabbing it for your department if you can (I believe one license can go on up to three computers).

Postgame, if I've been good about sorting throughout the game, my album shouldn't take much time to process and add to the website.

Prickett: I do most of my editing postgame, since my attention is usually on several other tasks getting taken care of during a game. Most of the time I’m relying on volunteer or student photographers to shoot games and I look at what they got after I’m done with whatever my gameday responsibility is. But, if I can solely focus on being the photographer at an event, I may have time to pick out a few during the game. Most of the time I find the photos that are solid enough for posting in their original state for social or a post-game recap.

Learning some quick tips on how to make your photos pop in Lightroom or Photoshop on the fly will help if you want to spend a quick bit of time enhancing a few shots before posting. If I do a good job at selecting a handful of quality shots that don’t need much editing, I can immediately bring those aside for social and post-game.

If you could offer a fellow CSC member a few important tips for shooting sports action, what would you say they need to focus on?

Prickett: 

Tip 1 – You don’t have to break the bank to have solid equipment. I went down the YouTube rabbit hole one summer day a few years back to educate myself on equipment that performed well for sports photography and make my office self-sufficient so I did not have to hire outside photographers. I learned a lot from several professionals and bloggers/vloggers. One eye opener was how some budget lenses are just as good as their major brand competitor that can sometimes cost three times the amount (for example Tamron and Sigma lenses in comparison to Nikon and Canon lenses). This is a good education for smaller shop athletic communications professionals looking to get quality equipment on a smaller budget.

I shoot the majority of my photos with a Tamron SP 70-200mm F2.8 G2 lens mounted on a Nikon D7500 body. The lens has been my go-to workhorse for several years now. It gives me versatility in daylight, night, and artificial light (gymnasiums) to photograph all sorts of sports. I chose the D7500 because it’s a crop sensor body, which has a 1.4 magnification rate. So, a 70-200mm lens becomes a 98-280mm lens and gives a little more stretch on distance for outdoor sports, but gets me nice close in action in a gymnasium. There are several good resources on YouTube that will make you better, so take the time to use them to your advantage.

Tip 2 – Don’t track the ball all the time. Be willing to shoot action away from the ball. Some of the best photos come when players are anticipating or preparing for a play coming their way, or when they are doing certain things away from the ball (even on the sidelines). A common issue I see in football for example is when a photographer always follows the ball, so you get 200 photos of the quarterback and just a couple to none of other key players. Same thing applies to some other sports where the ball is in the hands of certain players more often than others. You never know when that photo of the third string linebacker who only gets in on special teams might come in handy. Same goes for the athletes that might not get in until the waning moments of a game in a blowout situation. Sometimes focusing on players away from the ball for a few minutes helps build up a library of shots for several players, not just the ones touching the ball.

Tip 3 – Consider using single-shot instead of burst shot. Though it works good for some, I don’t use burst shot function when shooting action. One of the biggest reasons: I don’t have time to go through several hundreds of photos at the end of a game since I have several other tasks to take care of as an SID at the Division II level. I’m all about getting as many quality shots as I can instead of having to sift through 500 that didn’t focus properly. 

If you can get quick at using the single-shot function to get a few good images in a series of movements or actions by an athlete, you’ll save yourself time from having to delete potentially 5-10 extra images you don’t need if using burst function during that same situation. Some people may have the opinion of you’re working too hard to be perfect in the moment, but it’s a good time saver for me. Plus, I think it is a good challenge and rewarding when you can time your click of the trigger at the perfect moment, or even a few good ones all within fractions of a second apart.

Winning photography portfolio submissions from the 2022-23 CSC Creative & Digital Design Contest

University Division
1. Brigham Young University - Nate Edwards
2. University of Montana - Nic Hallisey
3. New Jersey Institute of Technology - Lamar Carter

College Division
1. Fort Hays State University - Ryan Prickett
2. University of the Cumberlands - Bill Turner
3. Carthage College - Kayleigh Wieska