Artist Statement:
This is a collection of my selected works from my fourth sports shoot under assignment of the Daily Texan, providing media coverage for March Madness' First and Second Rounds on March 2022. From four mediocre attempts at sports photography, I have learned for myself a couple of useful bullet points, in no particular order. Sports photography, as I've mentioned in my previous baseball shoot collection, requires a whole different set of disciplines and philosophies.
- Lighting: Shooting fast-paced sports mostly requires high emphasis on expensive equipment. Yes, the court is brightly lit for live coverage and audience, but for burst photography for such a fast-paced sport, lighting is not tailored for the ill-equipped. How much light you are able to collect while also maintaining specific apertures for frame composition and sharpness usually relies on high-end gear with fast aperture, huge sensors, and expensive glass. My 80D with a malfunctioning second-hand Sigma 18-35 barely made that cut, and it forces me to be more formulaic with my composition, with almost entirely wide-open aperture, one or two focus subjects, and in a lot of cases unwanted bokeh. Switching to my kit 18-55 (lackluster hardware usually compensated with extra work in post for other shoots) renders shots almost unusable with blurry bursts, focuses missed, and horrible light/noise performance. This conclusion is also backed up by the fact that fellow media photographers (from CNN, ESPN, Austin-American Statesman, KVUE, etc.) at the media sidelines alongside me were dragging along humongous bags of equipment and high-end cannon-sized tripoded lenses.
- Storage: My gosh, shoots like these eat your storage right up. The shoot only lasted for a bit more than one combined hour, but I ended up shooting almost 1600 photos taking up about 60 GB. That explains why photographers from professional mainstream media usually have a photographer assistant accompanying them to directly offload the photos onto a hard drive on the spot connected to a tablet, also helpful for instant news coverage and communication backwards to other workers back at the office. Through that I've learned a lot about the structure and workflow of professional media through observation of how they operate. One photographer was even kind enough to offer me advice on how to position myself so that I did not annoy other working photographers, and told me to bring a small stool next time if the front row of the media area is all taken, which was exactly my issue that evening.
- Composition: Framing for a close-up and fast-paced sport is some work. When you are restricted from the ability to use your feet and utilize elevation control, the playing field is altered quite a bit, and it forces the focus to be on immobile composition. Even though, to their credit, sitting at the media sideline is the perfect spot to achieve shots that highlight the greatness of poses, plays, movements, skills and dynamism. From a sitting position looking slightly up to the players on the court, it gives the players and the teams a sense of greatness, powerfulness and finesse. Another challenge to framing for me was the closeness of the net right by to our left, and how far the opposite net really was. Almost all other photographers were prepared for this, and so they brought two cameras with two focal-range lenses for this exact reason, and only needed to switch cameras in half a second when the action shifts to the other side of the court. I... ran on limited gear and a very limited budget, so that was pretty much impossible to achieve. I did try swapping to my 55-250 at times when action seemed to happen on the other side of the court for an extended period of time, but it was too inefficient to unscrew and screw on lenses in the middle of a mere 15-minute action-packed time period. Normally, if that issue occurs, I would just walk up closer to the action and continue shooting there, but... that would have caused some rumble in the arena.
Post-processing for this album was surprisingly easy for me, just a couple of reference hex values obtained from UT's official website, and color accordingly.
Anyway, I still have a lot to learn. It excites me, motivates me, and gives me life that I still have a plethora to learn amidst my journey of perfecting this craft.
