Sports Photographer in Reno Nevada.
Reno Sports Photographer
“As a photographer I love youth sports!”
I got my start as a professional photographer shooting sports.
Sports photography is a passion of mine. As an athlete growing up training and competing in gymnastics, track and field, wrestling, baseball, and football, I applied my athletic training to my photography combining an eye for composition in sports.
I’ve shot professional billiards to weight lifting, body building and boxing, football, baseball, softball and soccer, running, mountain biking and cycling, alpine ski racing and snowboarding, whitewater rafting and kayaking, rock climbing and adventure caving. I love shooting sports. I love being in the action, on location, on the field, or track, on the mountain, course, or river.
Sports photography is a challenging discipline. You have to be in the game in every way. Focused and doggedly on point. Shooting sports is highly dynamic. Bring your A-game!
You need to know the game and the sport, and anticipate where the action is, and be there! I find shooting youth sports is difficult. More challenging than shooting professional sports. It’s one thing being on assignment covering a game for say a journal, magazine or sports outlet where you have the entire game to produce a quota of quality shots for publication. It’s an entirely different game shooting youth sports for retail sales to parents. The latter is a lot more work.
Parents buy ‘great’ pictures of their kids! They don’t buy ‘OK’ pictures of their kids.
With a full field of players, capturing each player in exciting action is plain tough. Even with two photographers on the field, it requires constant coordination to cover every player consistently.
As a professional freelance photographer, when shooting youth sports I shoot about 2000 images per game. Two teams with roughly 15 kids per team equals 65 images per player. Of course this varies by sport, league and team size. Typically, fifty percent of each players images are worthy, meeting the ‘that’s amazing!’ category. The other fifty percent fall into the ‘nice but not amazing’ category. That leaves roughly 30 pictures per kid for retail sale to parents, which, if you have not grasped this yet, creates this moderately profitable and much appreciated industry in youth sports photography. Families, who buy photographs, are constantly amazed and so happy to posses professional quality sports imaging of their kids playing and competing in their favorite games.
Appreciation for what one does goes a long way in meeting personal gratification in a job.
I see and hear this gratification from parents all the time as a youth Sports Photographer. This is the real reason I enjoy shooting youth sports over professional and amateur sports. The appreciation for what we do as a photographer is openly apparent.
Watching kids get excited over their pictures is a worthy cause in itself.
Experiencing that type of validation as a professional sports photographer is less common. Shooting any sports game is a challenge. One I enjoy immensely, and continue to pursue in my seasonal work schedule.
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