Tuesday, March 1, 2011

My Crash Course on Football Photography

Last Thursday, I shot my first football game, and it was a heck of an experience. I had never shot football before due to the fact that nobody that was in my immediate family plays that ironic, tackling sport created by ironic Americans dubbed football. Of course, I had a press pass and shot most of my pictures from the sidelines. Again, unfortunately I can’t reveal any of the shots here because I was shooting for my school. I’ll try to do my absolute best to describe my experience, which was pretty awesome.

The lighting at the beginning of the game was a close to setting sun so there was plenty of light and my ISO was low and my shutter speed high. Of course, out of common sense, as the evening wore on, the shadow of the massive high school started to block that wonderful light that was getting me the kind of results I was getting. Not too long after that, the lights flickered on and my shutter speed started to deteriorate as my ISO shot up.

When I was shooting offense, the best place to be is ahead of the play, in the direction the team was going to be running. This gives you a longer time for viewing the play and more shots. Most of the plays that I shot were running plays because the team that I was shooting didn’t do many passing plays. If the play was close to the end zone and that’s where the play was most likely to go, I would stay behind the end zone.

Shooting defense is a challenge, but I tried and over all I think I succeeded in trying to get some shots of the defense, but I’ll tell you right now, defense is not as easy to shoot as offense.

For all of you asking, did I get knocked off my feet at all during the game by the players coming out of bounds? Yes, I did, but just to state facts, it’s common, very common. If you have ever watched a pro football game, then you just watch when one of the players goes tumbling out of bounds. No, none of my equipment was damaged. I don’t own a super long, expensive lens either, but still I think I got lucky.

If you know the game of football and you’ve seen the pictures in Sports Illustrated of football, then you know what you want to get. As long as you know what shots you want to get, you’ll try to get them. Go out there and shoot away!

~Jacob

2 comments:

  1. Are you going to post some pics?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unfortunately, I can't since I was on assignment by the school. It's against the rules and I am not allowed to post them anywhere.

    ReplyDelete