It’s 2004, and a group of young entrepreneurs is working on a wearable camera geared towards action sports. Their experimentation results in a multi-million dollar company that launches a series of versatile waterproof cameras that can be attached to a person or vehicle in any number of ways. Their products have been used to film everything from spear fishing to paintball battles. Oh, by the way, I’m not talking about GoPro.
Seven sports photographers are suing the National Football League, Getty Images and the Associated Press in a complex case that argues the agencies went too far in allowing their images to be freely used for promotions by the league.
Any professional photographer who's been working long enough has experienced the humiliation of missing the big shot, so it wasn't that big a story when two sports photographers missed Ichiro Suzuki's landmark 4,000th base hit at a recent New York Yankees game.
It's what happened afterward, when USA Today Sports Images photographer Debby Wong passed off a photo of another Suzuki swing as the iconic moment, that turned the incident into a significant photojournalism ethics fail.
What do you do when your last photo series went viral and earned you numerous awards and accolades? Well, if you're Jordan Matter, the photographer behind the wildly popular photo series and book Dancers Among Us, you move on to the next great idea.
For him, that means taking the original idea and tweaking it a bit. First he did Dancers Among Us, now he's capturing the dedicated and passionate lives of those professional Athletes Among Us.
You remember that one time when you wanted to put four of your 16:9 aspect ratio wide-screen TVs side by side and watch the game in super-panorama? Yeah, neither do we. But apparently Panasonic does, considering the 64:9 ultra-wide camera system the company has developed.
The folks over at NHK's (the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's) Science & Technology Research Laboratory have developed a groundbreaking multi-viewpoint, motion-controlled camera rig that could very soon be changing the way we view sports, among many other potential applications.
The rig is a robotically controlled system that links one camera to eight sub-cameras, all of which are pointing at the same thing. Basically, it's a bullet time rig that moves, enabling the people behind the lenses to take the technique of timeslicing to new heights.
Combining light painting with sports that involve long fluid motion is a match made in photography heaven that companies like Red Bull have already taken advantage of to create some pretty spectacular shots.
Photographers Joanna Jaskólska and Zach Ancell both had similar ideas, and their resulting photo series -- Breakdance Baby! and Trajectory -- are both unique examples of the awesome photography you can create when you mix dance, athletics and light painting.
The idea of being a sports photographer to many enthusiasts seems glamorous and exciting. Free and seemingly unfettered access to major league games with a view just meters away from live action. Akin to a soldier on a battleground armed with the latest gear, carefully and methodically (yet rapidly) shooting his subjects with the aim to make a publish-worthy photograph in the midst of chaos.
But what is it really like out there in the trenches? Is it all it's cracked up to be? More importantly: in a society where the almighty dollar is king, is it a viable source of income for a professional photographer?
While we're on the subject of Google Glass, check out this interesting use case by hockey player Joseph Lallouz. He decided to wear his Glass during a hockey match in order to capture what the sport looks and feels like from a participant's point of view.
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.
The 2013 Major League Baseball season kicked off this past weekend to the delight of fans of the sport across the US and across the world. Photographer Don Hamerman hasn't attended a ball game in over a decade, but he has a photo project that baseball enthusiasts may find quite interesting. It's a series titled Baseballs that shows off the beauty and diversity of found baseballs that were discarded after their usefulness was gone.
Some broadcasters around the world are starting to experiment with a new camera angle: the referee cam. By having refs on the field wear special high-definition cameras on the side of their head, the broadcasters are able to capture intense in-game footage that bring fans into the middle of the action.
You might recognize this iconic photograph of Michael Jordan flying through the air during the 1988 NBA Dunk Contest in Chicago. It was captured by renowned Sports Illustrated photographer Walter Iooss Jr., a man who has created some of the most memorable photographs of athletes over the past fifty years (another of his iconic photographs is "The Catch").
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.
Tim Kemple is an action-sport and lifestyle photographer based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Visit his website here.
PetaPixel: Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Tim Kemple: Sure. I'm a photographer and film maker based in Utah. I grew up on the East Coast and spent my weekends as a kid climbing, skiing and wandering. I started carrying a camera to document my adventures.
This photo is the greatest sports photo of all time -- at least according to Sports Illustrated. The magazine has published a gallery containing 100 of the greatest images (from an American's perspective), and the #1 image is the above shot of Michael Jordan hitting the game-winning shot to help the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz and win the 1998 NBA Finals in 6 games.
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.
As we shared last week, being a sports photographer at the Olympics is a difficult task: battling a round-the-clock schedule and a sea of competing photographers, hauling around a boatload of gear from venue to venue is just the least of your concerns.
Ever wonder what it's like to be the world's fastest man winning a gold medal at the Olympics? Usain Bolt wants you to know.
After sprinting to victory in the 200m race today, Bolt proceeded to run over to the photographers' pit, commandeer a Nikon DSLR from one of the photographers, and snap super wide angle views of what he was experiencing. The photographer, Jimmy Wixtröm of Aftonbladet (Scandinavia's largest paper), left the event with memories of a lifetime and a memory card containing epic images that are the envy of many a sports photographer.
Nate Jones over at Metro was recently looking through Getty Images in search of Olympic beach volleyball photos, when he came upon an interesting/"gross" discovery: some of the photographs focused on the body rather than the athlete or the sport. While other Olympic sport photos focus on action and emotion, it seems that certain beach volleyball photographers are intent on snapping images of behinds.
That got Jones thinking, "what if every Olympic sport was photographed like women's beach volleyball?" He then decided to take other shots of other sports and crop them through the lens of volleyball photographers. Here's a sampling of the hilarious images.
We’ve seen some very heavy-duty gear lugged out to cover the Olympic games in London this year: some …
Sports photographers sitting close to the action occasionally take a beating when athletes leave their field of play. This …
The Olympic games in London this year makes London the first city to have hosted the modern Olympic Games three times. The previous times were in 1908 and 1948. Here are some photographs captured at the 1908 Olympics 104 years ago, during a time when megaphones were used to announce events, top hats were all the rage, and dresses were worn by female competitors (this was the third games in which women were allowed to compete).
This behind-the-scenes video by the Associated Press gives a neat look at the various robotic cameras the agency will …
Sports photographers use a variety of techniques and gear to shoot from different angles that are less accessible to the photographers during action: wirelessly triggered cameras mounted behind backboards, perched on overhead catwalks, clamped on the ground. Reuters photographers Fabrizio Bensch and Pawel Kopczynski decided to take the technology of remote photography to another level for the upcoming 2012 Summer Olympics with robotic cameras.
Want to know what it’s like to cover a football game as the chief photographer of a school’s athletic …
“The Catch” is one of the most famous plays in American football history, …
In this video, commercial photographer Jay P. Morgan walks through how he went about shooting a composite sports photograph of Mexican soccer player Rafael Márquez.
Canada’s TSN created this “Top 10” compilation of clips showing sports photographers and …
Here’s a neat little behind-the-scenes video in which Michael Ivins, the official photographer …
German sports photographer Peter Langenhahn has an interesting way of documenting the important …
If you want to know the ins and outs of shooting a college basketball game, check out this awesome …
The Super Bowl isn’t just the biggest event in the NFL season, but one of the biggest events for …
Dean Blotto Gray of BLOTTO PHOTTO is the Burton Snowboards Principal Photographer. If there’s …
Seldom do the wonderful worlds of video games and photography meet, but when they do, fun often ensues.
The football season may be halfway over, but there’s still time left to gear up and hone your skills …