Earlier this year, photographer James Quantz Jr. got the opportunity to shoot the official photos for the 2013 South Carolina Gamecocks football team. So, at 6 o’clock one morning, he and his assistant found themselves at Williams Brice Stadium preparing to take the photos that will grace the teams posters, programs and tickets for the next calendar year.
As an added bonus, Dust of the Ground production company from Columbia, SC tagged along and put together this behind the scenes video that shows Quantz at work with the players and staff. Read more…
This famous photograph of legendary football wide receiver Desmond Howard is currently in the midst of a nasty legal battle. The photographer behind the image, Brian Masck, is suing Howard and a host of companies, claiming that his photo has been used without his permission for years for all kinds of commercial products and purposes. Read more…
Kris Kitani, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a unique type of image stabilization that can actually transform the footage from a camera attached to the side of a spinning football from nausea inducing, to smooth fly over.
The video at the top shows the footage he collected when he attached a GoPro to the side of a football. On the left you have the un-altered version, and on the right the version with his software applied. Read more…
Last week, Sports Illustrated magazine published the above photograph by US Presswire photographer Matthew Emmons. Found in the “Leading Off” section, the photo shows the Baylor Bears football team celebrating after their upset victory over the #2 ranked Kansas State Wildcats.
The image has many people talking, not because of the unlikely event that it captures, but because it appears to be heavily manipulated. And it’s not just the fact that the picture looks like it passed through an HDR program, but that the Baylor football players didn’t wear green jerseys during that game. They wore black. Read more…
Soccer, known as football around the world, is played by hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of countries, making it the world’s most popular sport. However, a large percentage of its enthusiasts are unable to afford actual soccer balls to play with. Instead, they fashion their own makeshift balls out of things they have on hand — things like socks, rubber bands, plastic bags, strips of cloth, and string. The DIY balls may be difficult to use and ugly in appearance, but each one is a treasured possession of its owner.
Belgian photographer Jessica Hilltout decided to turn her attention and her camera lens on these one-of-a-kind creations, documenting “football in its purest form” in Africa. The project is titled AMEN. Read more…
Should Photoshop play a role in political correctness? Louisiana State University is drawing some criticism this week after it came to light that the university had used Photoshop to erase Christian crosses from the chests of body-painted fans. Read more…
A couple of weeks ago, photographer Mike Simons of Tulsa World covered the annual college football game between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns football. Known as the Red River Rivalry, the series considered one of the greatest rivalries in American sports. To capture what photographing the conclusion of such a big game is like, Simons decided to wear a GoPro camera on his head to record a first-person point of view. Read more…
Four years ago, Kai-Huei Yau had an idea. During a presidential election year, why not create a series of high school football preview photographs that tie into the political atmosphere? This year, the Tri-City Herald photographer finally put the idea into motion. His “Football Campaign 2012″ series features portraits of local high school football players that make them look like they’re running for office rather than preparing for a season of war on the gridiron. Read more…
Reuters photographer Murad Sezer was shooting at an uber-important soccer final in Turkey last Saturday when he found himself in the midst of a massive clash between frenzied fans and police officers. In the chaos, fans started picking up everything they could get their hands on to use as projectiles, including camera lenses. Sezer writes,
While waiting for the trophy ceremony, the work room was packed with photographers – with evidence they had covered a riot. Broken cameras, lenses and laptops were scattered around as photographers tried to assess the damage while others tried to figure out if they were missing equipment. [...] While we were editing and sending our pictures to the Singapore desk my colleague Umit Bektas showed me a picture he took during the clashes. It was hard to believe but a fan was throwing a Canon 400mm 2.8 telephoto lens with monopod, (worth some $10,000 USD) onto the field. In that moment of truth, I knew it was a good idea to lock my 400mm in a hardcase.
Results of the Saturday night soccer violence: 3 cameras broken, 10 lenses (including a 400mm tele) damaged or missing, a laptop broken, 10 photographers directly exposed to violence.
Lesson learned: shooting a soccer match in some places can be the same thing as shooting in a war zone.
Want to know what it’s like to cover a football game as the chief photographer of a school’s athletic department? Photographer Joel Hawksley created this day-in-the-life time-lapse video after being assigned to cover a football game between Ohio University and Temple University. It starts early in the morning when he pulls out of his driveway, and ends at night when he pulls in. In between we see everything from setting up, shooting, post-processing, and uploading/emailing photographs. Hawksley used a Nikon D700 and D300 to photograph the game, and a Canon G9 to capture the time-lapse images throughout the day.
