Sports Photography In San Jose

Sports Photography In San Jose | High School Boy’s Basketball – Leigh vs. Pioneer

In the course of a year, I may only photograph one or two sporting events. It was actually what I started off doing, as a Photographer. For most of my life, I have been involved in sports and so it was something I gravitated towards when I started off in photography. At one time, I even sponsored a youth softball team. My business name was on the back of their jerseys. And I would show up, take pictures, and try to get parents to by my images. There did not seem to be much competition for sports photography in San Jose. And I thought I would be the one to establish a profitable business 🙂 I quickly found out why there were not many more Photographers doing what I was doing! You really cannot make much money doing it 🙂 But I did really like shooting sports.

Sports Photography vs. Portraiture

There are many different genres of photography. You can shoot sports. If you don’t like working with people, there is landscape and architectural photography 🙂 And then there is portraiture – which is basically shooting people. While the different photography genres encompass different skill sets, some of the skills overlap. With sports, you have to be able to anticipate where the action is going to be. If you are photographing baseball, for example, you know that the batter is probably not going to swing on a 3-0 count. You can focus on taking pictures of the base runner in this situation.

With basketball, you need to be able to adjust your settings to accommodate for less light and people moving really fast. Using flash photography is frowned upon – and I’ve actually seen someone try to shoot a high school basketball game this way. They were quickly told to stop – because it was just too distracting.

Capturing The Moment

Perhaps the thing I enjoyed the most about sports photography was capturing the competition. Especially in really competitive high school games. Photographing things like T-Ball is almost the opposite 🙂 The kids don’t really know what to do when the ball gets hit to them; they’re dancing around in the outfield. And it is just really cute to see them all dressed up in their uniforms. The most excited moment for them is when the snacks are passed out after the game!