Sports Photography How To

I travel to take pictures, but sometimes I just happen to be in an interesting area, like last spring in Lexington, Kentucky. Let’s see: Lexington, horse country, the Keeneland racetrack nearby, and me never without my camera gear. Photography was bound to happen.

Scott Serfas is one photographer who likes to get in on the action. In fact, he thrives on it. There is a certain amount of serendipity involved, but there is also a certain amount of passive control, in the sense that Serfas knows what to expect and expects the unexpected.

What’s the biggest challenge about photographing a dirt bike jumping into a swimming pool? “Aside from not dying by either being hit by the bike from landing so close, or being electrocuted by the lighting power pack since the area around the pool was only about two-feet wide, the hardest part was to understand how to send a signal underwater to fire off the strobes above to get the necessary lighting,” photographer Jean-Paul Van Swae said about this spectacular shot.

Professional sports photography for the editorial market is an endangered species. Unfortunately, a lot of it has to do with editorial clients turning away from the professional photographer to sports enthusiasts who are willing to trade their photos for season tickets.

Megan Rapinoe captured the World Cup this year with the United States Women’s National Soccer Team and photographer Simon Bruty captured her in this heroic black-and-white image. The photo is actually from 2011 and was shot for Sports Illustrated as a preview of the women’s team for that year’s World Cup in Germany.

The race was more joy than suspense. American Pharoah had already taken the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, and he led the 2015 Belmont Stakes from the start and was never challenged. Early on, racing fans at Belmont Park were pretty sure they were going to see the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years.

Mark Alberhasky, for one. Put him in a great situation where he can take very cool photographs and he’ll nail them nine times out of 10. Chances are, though, that won’t be enough. Just because the photos he’s making look good doesn’t mean he won’t be thinking about what he can do to create even better ones. You can attribute that drive to several factors, one of which is his early realization that if he took a straightforward photo of what everyone else was seeing, no matter how good a photo it was, it would be just that: what everyone else was seeing. The goal was to come up with his own ideas and add them to the creative process, and many of Mark’s photos are the result of taking that e