Tips for taking spectacular sports pictures

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Patuxent Homestead photographers cover scores of high school sporting events during the school year. They capture hundreds of goals and runs, victories and losses, tears of joy and sadness. Photographers Jen Rynda and Brian Krista each picked six of their favorites from baseball, softball, lacrosse and track, and shared a couple of tips for taking great sports shots. (Below)

From Jen:

People say baseball is a game of inches but I like to think sports photography is a game of centimeters. Sure it doesn’t sound as cool but it is the honest truth. You need to have right equipment, be able to anticipate the action, have just the right amount of luck to capture that fleeting moment and hope that a referee doesn’t move a centimeter to block you before the winning goal. My sports photography teacher at Rochester Institute of Technology and former co-worker Jay Capers taught me a rule of thumb to judge a good sports photograph. He said you have to have at least two of the three following things to make a good sports photograph:

1. Peak action

2. Game telling

3. It needs to be technically correct, for example is the photo in focus and exposed correctly.

Also, keep in mind that emotion sets great photographs apart from good ones.

From Brian:

The reason I enjoy photographing sports is because it’s always a challenge. After becoming more familiar with a sport, and its specific rules, you become aware of the different possible shots that can be attained, but you always want to strive to obtain a different image or angle that you’ve never gotten before. And while you’re trying to capture that critical action-packed play, it’s the ones that also capture the emotion of the moment that make you feel like you did a good job at the end of the game.